The Neighbours You Never Meet

My not-so-successful first capture of a badger under a dim environment. Taken in 2021.

Me and the badgers. Where do I begin?

I have a long history of having tried and failed to photograph these beautiful yet human-wary creatures in the wild. Every time I encountered a new issue on location, I bought a new piece of accessory believing that it would aid me get the shot I wanted. But as is often the case, throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it at all, none was more true in my case.

I had near misses all right - half-a-second glimpse of a badger here and there shuffling hastily from one bush to another, for instance. But the stunning images of badgers posing, frolicking, scratching and relaxing in the golden hour captured by other photographers as showcased on social media fuelled my desire to watch them in a similar setting but equally tormented me because I just could not locate badgers in the south east with similar lighting conditions where I could relatively easily keep on going back.

Badgers are nocturnal and live underground, in a den called ‘sett’. They use their strong front arms and claws to dig out the sett therefore they seem to naturally prefer somewhere on a moderate slope as they can simply dig diagonally. The structure of a sett is normally supported by trees and roots. So this means they tend to live in a wooded area where residual light from the setting sun fades first because of dense tree canopies.

These factors mean it is doubly or trebly difficult to photograph badgers decently unless perhaps you live in the north where the daylight hours are even longer in summer. The top image was the only capture I had managed locally in London but shot using ISO12800 therefore grainy and I wasn’t entirely happy with it. It’s only good as evidence shot, probably.

This year though, a very good friend of mine living in Somerset, fully knowing my long history of anguish with the badgers (not of typical kind!), asked around his network of friends and put me in touch with someone who happens to have a garden that wild badgers visit nightly. So my badger project has begun once again!

Two badgers foraging busily in the bushes.

The garden was on a downward slope, and at the top (highest point) of the garden was an out-building with a decked-out balcony which was roughly a metre high from the ground. We decided to put a trail camera on a tree trunk on the ground to capture their movements while we sat on the deck so that our scent would escape the badgers’ noses.

With that set-up we took to our positions with me holding my camera sat on the decked-out balcony and waited. At about 20:40, as advised beforehand, two cubs started to emerge near the sett entrance itching to come out. We could hardly contain our joy at this tremendous sight. Never did we imagine that we would see cubs first! Trying to remain absolutely silent we leant over to have a better look at the cubs. As the area was still heavily covered in leaves and twigs, it was difficult to get a clear view of them but we could see the trademark stripes and it felt surreal. With their fur so fresh and beautiful, it was difficult to accept that what we saw in front of us were creatures that favour to live in dark burrows underground.

A lot of to and fros continued thereafter. One badger came out, then another hastily retreated back into the sett. This was repeated many times and none up until this point gave us an unobstructed view. So we feared they sensed our presence and were hesitant to come out.

Since this was our first evening of observation, the main purpose was to work out their pattern of movements so that we can identify the best position to photograph them from within the garden, but when you have camera in your hands your eagerness to capture an image can nearly get the better of you.

Extend your neck and sniff! A badger being cautious.

The first thing they do is to check the coast is clear, and this takes the longest. Perhaps as a result of long persecutions, only timid and cautious badgers must have survived therefore they indeed take time to check their surroundings for any sign of danger. Their rather weak eyesight means they mainly use their acute olfactory sense to catch any potential risk, which might not be bullet proof depending on the wind directions. Second, when they gain a little more confidence, they go into a small bush nearby where they can still remain largely covered by vegetation. They rarely appear out in the open straight out of a sett and start foraging immediately. This creates lots of fast initial movements in the vegetation as they are nervous and seek cover. But before I learned this routine, I stupidly tried to follow them running from bush to bush with my lens, which was totally futile.

A shot showing their typical cautiousness and timidness - poking its nose out gradually to see if they can come out safely…

At long last after the frustrating wait, the cubs started to venture out further and further away from the sett entrance once the adult badgers had given the green light. Perhaps it’s their hunger that makes them bolder; they don’t waste time beating around the bush - they would come almost straight to the open lawn for foraging.

Two badger cubs forage happily on the grass.

The general wisdom is that badgers have acute sense of smell. There is no doubt about it. Our trail cam footage seems to corroborate this - the adults initially looked wary of the areas of the garden which had our scent on. But I’m not so sure about the cubs’ sense of smell - they seemed more nonchalant and easy going. Perhaps it means that they can smell many different things but they are not yet wired in their brain to take our scent as a sign of danger.

There were a couple of very interesting observations, too. One evening during the Platinum Jubilee celebration it rained heavily when I was shooting using a remote device to control the camera placed away from me on the ground. As the rain started to gain intensity, I felt I would have to retrieve my camera where the cubs foraged. I gingerly and carefully went down the steps so as not to make a sound and was literally 1- 1.5 meters away from the cubs but they didn’t seem to notice me at all. Of course one can argue that the sound of the rain muffled the noise my waterproof jacket made as I moved, and the rain could have masked my scent, too. Another revealing observation was their tolerance of noise. My camera has two shutter modes - mechanical and electronic. Although normally set to ‘electronic’ to enable totally silent shooting, it had been set to ‘mechanical’ as I was doing some portrait photography during the day using flash. As I completely forgot to put it back to the silent mode, the camera made a hell of a mechanical noise when I pressed the shutter remotely! But this, to my astonishment, didn’t surprise either the cubs or adults. These little ‘hints’ gave me confidence to try out a new shooting style a couple of nights later.

To continue to part 2…….