BADGERS.
THE correspondence which has been lately running in the pages of the Times on the subject of badgers is a capital example of the difficulty of finding a single satisfactory
answer to the question so often asked about birds and beasts, Is it harmless or not ? That question is propounded far more often to-day than it used to be, and it is satisfactory that so much interest should be taken in the various replies. The list of animals who are tried in books and newspapers is a long one. Rooks, owls, hawks, weasels, squirrels, badgers, partridges, pheasants—each and all have their assailants and their champions, and the prosecuting and defending counsel often present appareutly unanswerable cases in regard to the same animal. The jury, it is not to be wondered at, find it difficult occasionally to agree on a verdict. Rooks, the prosecution urges, devour corn, potatoes, eggs ; rooks, we are told by the defence, clear fields of grubs, insects, wireworms. Owls and hawks kill rats and mice; but sparrow-hawks and some kestrels attack partridge and pheasant chicks, and therefore the gamekeeper fires at them. Weasels destroy pheasant chicks and countless rats; squirrels take birds' eggs, pheasants swallow mangolds, partridges bite young clover ; and now comes the turn of the badger. One of the first of the Times correspondents complains of the depredations of badgers among fox cubs ; another gives evidence of a raid upon poultry ; others proclaim the innocence and usefulness of the badgers of which they have had personal experience, and the shifting balance of evidence makes it more and more difficult for the inexperienced to come to a conclusion.
There is really only one conclusion to which to come, which is that it is impossible to lay down any bard-and-fast rule as to the behaviour of all badgers in all surroundings. This is probably true of all animals which are omnivorous, and seems to be particularly true of creatures of more than average intelligence. Such creatures seem to make up their minds more quickly than others, are more ready to contemplate or to abide by a change, adapt themselves more readily to altered conditions—in fact, they make experiments. If they find they like some new article of diet and it agrees with them, they go on with it ; if no suggestion or temptation as to a change is put before them, they are very likely content to go on the old lines. One of the best instances of this easy adoption of new opportunities occurs among birds in the starling. The starling probably increases in these islands every year ; there seems to be no doubt that our native birds are constantly being reinforced by a wave of migrating starlings, which may stretch as far east as Siberia, an.d as this wave sweeps gradually in, there is a corresponding increase in the demand for suitable starling food. The result is that the habits of starlings in England have changed, and besides being insectivorous, the birds have now become pronounced fruit-eaters, capable of clearing a cherry orchard in a few hours. In Australia, in the same way, besides being a pest to the fruit-farmer, starlings have taken to eating grain, and the flocks of birds have developed in some districts into a perfect plague. That is an instance of changing habits, easily verifiable by ordinary observers, among birds. But changing or variable habits among other animals are not always so easily and accurately compared. The badger is a case in point. He works and feeds at night, and when damage is done by night those who discover it the next morning are apt to be a little indiscriminate in deciding as to the cause. If an effort were made to prove that here or there the badger has been forced out of the routine of his ordinary habits by some extraneous change in his surroundings, it would be necessary to weigh very carefully every scrap of evidence. Much has been laid to the credit of the badger which may equally well have been the work of a fox or a dog. No doubt exists as to the main facts. The badger is omnivorous, and willing to try a change. His staple diet consists of slugs, snails, worms, beetles, frogs, roots, young birds, mice, moles—almost anything of a manageable size. He will take a nest of young rabbits, digging straight down upon them, and leaving the skin of the young rabbit pulled off inside out, much as if it were a glove. He has no objection tofresh or addled eggs, or to young poultry, though his misdeeds in this direction are comparatively infrequent. He likes an occasional snake or slow-worm, and he is particularly fond of wasp-grubs. During the past summer, which in many places has been a great season for wasps, the writer has found nest after nest scratched out by badgers ; in nearly every case the nest had not been long begun and was not very large, but the whole of it Was dug out and all except a little of the driest part of the comb eaten. Is It tee La. as it is stated by most writers on the habits of badgers, that the stings of wasps have no effect upon them, or that the wasps are unable to penetrate the badger's thick, loose skin ? Pictures have been drawn of badgers calmly excavating wasps' nests with dozens of wasps settling on their heads, but have these been actually drawn from personal observation on the spot ? Even with so thickskinned a creature as a badger, there must be tender places round the eyes and in the nostrils which you would suppose must be occasionally found out by wasp-stings. At all events, from the appearance of the ground round one very strong wasps' nest in particular, which the writer examined this summer, he is inclined to think that the wasps may sometimes be too much for the badger, This nest was a large one, and the badger had made an excavation about twice as big as an ordinary wash-basin. But he had only taken part of the comb, and had left behind him a homestead furiously alive with puzzled insects. Round the nest the grass was flattened and earthy, as if the badger had rolled over and over. It was decided to watch to see if the badger would return; but this particular creature met with the usual fate—a gamekeeper
caught sight of it early one morning, and quickly decided as to the best use to which it could be put. One of the Times correspondents compared the rare misdeeds of the badger in the poultry yard or with the pheasant's nest to the crimes of the man-eating tiger, and the comparison is a sound one. It is only an occasional badger who breaks out of the harmless rut of insects, snails, and possibly young rabbits. His eccentricities ought not to make an excuse for the destruction of badgers on every opportunity. The badger who has taken to poultry-stealing must be put out of the way? Granted ; he has become a destructive nuisance, and has lost his claim to protection. But his cousin or his brother may be, and probably is, a normal member of the badger community, and deserves to be preserved as one of the most interesting and ancient forms of mammal life in this hemi sphere. The badger has not yet finally settled into his place in the scheme of evolution. Some obscure link still connects him with a changing past. The main facts and influences of his existence still remain indeterminate ; the period of gestation varies in individuals, and apparently can be prolonged or shortened according to circumstances. Mr. A. H. Cocks, who has written much on the badger in the Zoologist, has proved that the badger may carry young for as short a period as five months, and for as long as fifteen. Sir Alfred Pease, a very close observer, believes that the period may be no more than nine weeks ; and Mr. J. G. Millais believes the average to be twenty-two. In other directions the habits of the badger are as engaging as they are original. One of them is an e!aborate system of spring-cleaning, which takes place every year about March, when the badger removes the whole of the old litter from his "earth " or "set," and brings in new. Sir Alfred Pease, in his book, The Badger, has given a delightful account of this proceeding :—
"The badger," he writes, "will come out, take v. look round, and sit awhile close to the mouth of the hole. He will then shuffle about and get further from the hole. You will watch him descend into some bracken-covered hollow, and will see nothing more of him for a while. Then you will hear him gently pushing and shoving and grunting, and know that he is very busy over something. He will reappear bumping along backwards a heap of bracken and of grass or old straw, left from a pheasant feed, under his belly and encircled by his arms and forefeet. He will continue this most undignified and curious mode of retrogression to the earth, and will disappear, tail first, down his hole, still hugging and tugging at his burden." He is equally precise and cleanly in his personal habits, and because of his practice of resorting every day to the same spot of scraped soil, instead of fouling his earth, he has been acclaimed by an admirer as the inventor of the ear ,h closet. Throughout all his proceedings be displays the work ing of a receptive and ingenious mind. Mr. J. 0-. Millais, in British Mammals, tells a pleasing story of a badger which outwitted a friend of his, an old Wiltshire keeper. The keeper had decided that the badger was mischievous and must be destroyed; he knew that it came to look under the trees of a rookery for young birds fallen out of the nests, and he therefore set a ring of steel spring traps round a young rook or rabbit used as bait. Every morning the traps were sprung, but caught no badger. So the keeper determined to watch and see for himself what happened. He climbed a tree, and waited. When the badger came up to the ring of traps, it
stopped, and then turned head over heels over the gin. It ate some rabbit, nosed about a bit, and then took another somersault over the gin, leaving in it merely a few long hairs from its broad back. This seemed to the keeper remarkable enough, but shortly afterwards he became convinced that badgers could be neither trapped nor shot. He met the same badger, and fired twice at it at close quarters. Doubtless he missed it altogether, but his own account was that it merely turned another somersault and bolted off to its earth.
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