Nick Jones Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 Safe to say that people who think badgers are cute and cuddly..... don’t have them digging up their gardens..... I fear this is only the beginning .......
rogerguzzi Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 Hello Nick There must be plenty of woms in there We tend to have moles Bowling greens have neither they just posion the worms! Roger
Sidescreen Ben Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 Oh dear Nick, they’re probably after leatherjackets. Were you aware of lots of daddylonglegs in the autumn?
Nick Jones Posted March 18, 2021 Author Posted March 18, 2021 2 hours ago, rogerguzzi said: We tend to have moles Get them too. The current one appears to be trap-savvy, which is irritating. 1 hour ago, Sidescreen Ben said: Were you aware of lots of daddylonglegs in the autumn? Not especially. The badgers certainly are in digging mode at the moment though, there is a field 1/4mile away that has about 50m2 that looks like someone has run amok with a large rotavator. I’d really like to avoid that!
rogerguzzi Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 49 minutes ago, Nick Jones said: Get them too. The current one appears to be trap-savvy, which is irritating. Hello Nick I use 3 traps and a bit of welding rod to probe which way the tunnel runs (I wish you could still get Moles smokes! Cyanide!!) Roger
PeterC Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 Try giving the badgers a cup of peanuts on the patio- they'll make it abreakfast stop and you can watch them. Might make the lawn less attractive. They wander 5-ish km at night
Sidescreen Ben Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 Electric fencing as used for livestock (mostly horses in our case) is an effective way of keeping them off an area. If you can beg borrow so much the better! Plastic stakes enable low fencing at badger snout height......
Escadrille Ecosse Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 Cool having badgers in your garden... We have f......g grey squirrels! We do have frogs in our pond though. Which is also cool, especially as we are only a mile or so from Glasgow city centre
Nick Jones Posted March 18, 2021 Author Posted March 18, 2021 Got grey squirrels..... moderately irritating in the garden- catastrophic in the loft...... How they can eat the insulation of mains voltage wiring without barbecuing themselves is beyond me.... I’m hoping I’ve solved that one. I used electric fencing against badgers at our last house. New turf was laid and night after night the striped bastards would rip it up again. I went out one evening to explain to brother badger with a large spade. Close up, he was a big, ugly battle-scarred brute with very big teeth, and he eyeballed me with an “oh yeah, only you?” look, so I decided to use technology. That fixed him. Kept him off my turf anyway. He still ate next door’s chickens. The fencing equipment got moved on a long time ago and I’d need a hell of a lot of fence here..... 1
rogerguzzi Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 8 minutes ago, Nick Jones said: Got grey squirrels. Hello Nick They are tree rats that have killed / driven out the red squirrels basically vermin and nasty(you get one cornered and see!!!) Roger
Nick Jones Posted March 18, 2021 Author Posted March 18, 2021 There is a rich vein of these to be mined if you are so inclined. Apparently “they just don’t learn”
rogerguzzi Posted March 18, 2021 Posted March 18, 2021 Hello Nick they should be weighted down first! Roger ps sorry if this upsets some people but they are not nice and cuddly they are RATS
JohnD Posted March 19, 2021 Posted March 19, 2021 (edited) Drowning is a bit cruel. I shoot 'em. I wouldn't shoot a badger, though, not without a heavier calibre weapon. Edited March 19, 2021 by JohnD
PaulAA Posted March 19, 2021 Posted March 19, 2021 22 hours ago, Nick Jones said: There is a rich vein of these to be mined if you are so inclined. Apparently “they just don’t learn” There is. But none of them has yet recorded a bullseye in the bin. This one got pretty close:
Nick Jones Posted March 19, 2021 Author Posted March 19, 2021 Ha! Pity, the yellow bin looks so hungry.... Either he’s got a ridiculous number of squirrels or they actually enjoy it (or desperately slow learners). There was one on a couple of years ago (which I can’t find now) where they managed to dye-mark some of the squirrels, so it becomes obvious that it was the same few squirrels going time and time again......
MilesA Posted March 20, 2021 Posted March 20, 2021 Sister in law lives less than two miles from the centre of Belfast. Realised a couple of months ago that a badger was visiting her rear garden most nights. Confirmation via webcam that in fact it is a pair of them. The new urban menace? Miles
PaulAA Posted March 20, 2021 Posted March 20, 2021 20 minutes ago, MilesA said: Sister in law lives less than two miles from the centre of Belfast. Realised a couple of months ago that a badger was visiting her rear garden most nights. Confirmation via webcam that in fact it is a pair of them. The new urban menace? Miles After a brush with one of the buggers in the Cotswolds thirty-odd years ago ("ooh, what big teeth you have grandma!"), I'm with JohnD - heavy calibre weaponry is the only viable response.
Nick Jones Posted March 20, 2021 Author Posted March 20, 2021 1 hour ago, PaulAA said: heavy calibre weaponry is the only viable response. They are protected here..... Though in these parts at certain times of year it is truly remarkable how bad their road sense appears to be..... Nothing like a bit of marmelising by passing traffic to disguise the true cause of death maybe? 1 hour ago, PaulAA said: "ooh, what big teeth you have grandma!" Oh yeah..... hence my afore mentioned tactical retreat..... last time I got a good look at teeth like that they belonged to a large male baboon and I didn’t argue with him either. (Not in the garden!) 1
JohnD Posted March 20, 2021 Posted March 20, 2021 2 hours ago, PaulAA said: After a brush with one of the buggers in the Cotswolds thirty-odd years ago ("ooh, what big teeth you have grandma!"), I'm with JohnD - heavy calibre weaponry is the only viable response. I was being kind, not cowardly! A 22 air rifle will kill a squirrel outright, but only wound a badger. Lots of 'badger deterrents' online, which probably showsthat none work! 1
Nick Jones Posted March 20, 2021 Author Posted March 20, 2021 Electric fences work. Not always practical. Barbed wire cab work if properly applied in sufficient quantity - think WW1 trenches.... After that it heavy caliper weapons. Or a motor vehicle. Needs to be a very robust motor vehicle though as badgers are pretty robust.....
Sprint95m Posted March 20, 2021 Posted March 20, 2021 Red squirrels are being reintroduced to areas of Scotland where they had disappeared and no grey squirrels are present. This is working so far (early days and all that). A more ambitious project is to try and save the Scottish wildcat from extinction. The plan is to use captive breeding to produce kittens that will be released. Beavers have been reintroduced. There are separate proposals to reintroduce wolves and lynx. I have never seen a badger. They don’t quite occur this far north, the nearest sett is about 30 miles away. Regarding their lack of road sense, do they have poor eyesight? Some mammals are short sighted because they only use their eyes at short range. Otters I think are like that, they will come quite close to check you out. In the back end of the year they are fairly common roadkill here sadly. Otters have formidable teeth and won’t let go until they hear their victim’s bones crunch! Can I attach an iPhone video? Filmed some otters in the town centre last May... Ian
rogerguzzi Posted March 21, 2021 Posted March 21, 2021 Hello All About a week ago I took the dog for her last !!!!! etc and she went rushing off and the next thing I knew was these 2 pairs of eyes running back to me ! And 1 pair was a badger which our dog probably thought would play with her!!!!!! So there I am shouting at the dog to leave it alone and waving the stick at the badger to shoo it back because they have big claws and big teeth and the dog would have come off worse and cost a fortune at the vets! Roger
JohnD Posted March 21, 2021 Posted March 21, 2021 11 hours ago, Sprint95m said: Can I attach an iPhone video? Filmed some otters in the town centre last May... Ian Ian, Are you in Kendal? A pair of otters in the River Kent, filmed last year from the Stramongate Bridge: https://www.facebook.com/cumbriawildlifetrust/videos/387738425704384/ And a friend posted a shorter clip of them on Facebook the other day, from the same bridge, but being on Fb I can't find it now. Reintroducing extinct native animals - rewilding - has many advantages, and shows how ecology WORKS! This paper showed that where there are pine martens, reds succeed while greys do not. As the marten will prey on both species of squirrel, the title of the paper was most appropriate: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2017.2603
PaulAA Posted March 21, 2021 Posted March 21, 2021 10 hours ago, rogerguzzi said: Hello All About a week ago I took the dog for her last !!!!! etc and she went rushing off and the next thing I knew was these 2 pairs of eyes running back to me ! And 1 pair was a badger which our dog probably thought would play with her!!!!!! So there I am shouting at the dog to leave it alone and waving the stick at the badger to shoo it back because they have big claws and big teeth and the dog would have come off worse and cost a fortune at the vets! Roger The eyes... When I moved to Berlin in the early 90s, I lived on the outskirts of the city. Beyond the city boundary, in fact, and about a kilometre's walk along a paved road through the forest from the nearest S Bahn station. One Saturday night, returning from a night on the tiles in the wee small hours, I was plodding up the unlit forest road when the distant light from the S Bahn station half a kilometre behind me was picked out a pair of eyes. Then another pair. And another. There were maybe a dozen pairs of stationary, glowing eyes ahead of me. With an increasingly fragile sphincter, I considered my options - wait for death, run and be mauled, or climb a tree (certainly no shortage in the immediate vicinity). Then the ringleader ahead of me grunted (or sneezed) and I took my chance with a step to my right. In unison, all the eyes shuffled to the left. I tried another step and so did all the eyes. Finally, we reached a position where we were more or less parallel to each other and simultaneously broke into a run in opposite directions. After a while, I turned to see what had scared me witless, to see a family of wild boar legging it doen the road in the direction of the station, then suddenly vere off into the woods.
Sprint95m Posted March 21, 2021 Posted March 21, 2021 1 hour ago, JohnD said: Ian, Are you in Kendal? A pair of otters in the River Kent, filmed last year from the Stramongate Bridge: https://www.facebook.com/cumbriawildlifetrust/videos/387738425704384/ And a friend posted a shorter clip of them on Facebook the other day, from the same bridge, but being on Fb I can't find it now. No John, I stay in Wick in the north of Scotland. Otters are pretty numerous here. https://www.facebook.com/100016399511073/videos/663147524241892 This was filmed last May at about 10:30 at night. Ian.
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