Tag: Badgers
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Tolkien and cars and Heathcote Williams, Badgers, Reggae, Cranes, Michael Palin in Venezuela, Eating Swans, Sparrows, Deer, a Butterfly, Elephants, Parakeets and Zack Polanski
Badger survey A good day on Sunday. Firstly a badger sett survey in the Arborfield area. We didn’t find a sett but there are definitely badgers about, as evidenced by hairs found on wire fencing (our ace finder of such things always dives down when he sees a push-through) and what was almost certainly a…
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Badger sett survey June 2025
A blisteringly hot Sunday, which I don’t mind at all – I love the heat – or, if you are a fan of The Fast Show, it was scorchio! For much of the day though the woods offered cooler shade. We had covered this area near Reading before, in 2021, but the setts are especially…
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Gallimaufry: Badgers, birds and birdsong, royal hands, Coyotes, an Oak Tree, a Colossal Squid, a Slow Worm & aliens
Gallimaufry is a great word. A colleague at an antiquarian bookshop was very fond of it and various other synonyms for miscellany. It’s a French stew. Olla podrida is a Spanish stew (pot pourri is the direct French equivalent), also used by the book cataloguer to my mystification at the time, salmagundi and macédoine are…
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Badgers & Development; British Steel & Thames Water; Trump and his tariffs
Apologies for the uneven appearance of sub-headers in this and recent posts, a WordPress issue which they are currently trying to resolve. Development “Bats or great crested newts?” “Neither because I want growth.” This was Rachel Reeves in an interview not so long ago. She may as well have said “money” instead of “growth”. Starmer…
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George Monbiot on Question Time, Drax, badger latrines and three animals new to me from crossword clues
5 ≠ 10 George Monbiot is a great speaker of truth. His book Feral: rewilding the land, sea and human life, Penguin, 2014 in particular is simply superb. Focussing only on the discussion of the scandals besetting Rachel Reeves it was almost comical to witness the pathetic nature of the Labour spokesperson’s defence. The questioner…
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Betrayal of badgers and voters by the Labour government yet again
A short and very angry post. I can scarcely find the words and had to make myself watch Rob Pownall of Protect the Wild’s video about this. Another member of our badger group has said that it made her feel physically sick. Disgusting, craven, spineless … As Rob says, politicians just can’t admit that they…
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A Swan, a Badger, a Gyrfalcon, a Fox, and Squirrel and Songbird theatre
A first for me at HART Wildlife Rescue this week. Whilst others worked inside with the hedgehogs, I was assigned the Collared and Stock Doves and Feral Pigeons outside, which I am used to, and a Mute Swan, which I am not. The columbines flapped about a fair bit in the aviary but soon calmed…
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Sett survey November 24 with many fungi
This was our most outright enjoyable survey for some time with quite the profusion of wildlife, overshadowed only by the knowledge that the area (not far from me) is commonly and currently used for hare coursing, which is of course illegal. Just the day before a woman had remonstrated with a perpetrator from her window.…
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Sett survey September 2024
For obvious reasons, locations of our surveys and especially the locations of setts is left deliberately vague but the combined presence of badgers and supposedly bio-secure (according to at least one farmer) free-ranging cattle on Greenham Common in Berkshire is so well-known and controversial that there seems little harm in saying that we spent some…
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Sir Brian May, badgers & farmers: thoughts after the BBC programme
As previously discussed, Tim Bonner of the Countryside Alliance made a complete fool of himself by trying to stop the BBC from broadcasting the programme on the grounds that it was biased, before he had even seen it. Since I hadn’t seen it either, I made no claim that it wasn’t biased, but now that…
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Sir Brian May, badgers, farmers and the Countryside Alliance
Sir Brian’s long-awaited programme about the badger cull will be available on the BBC on Friday. For our badger group, campaigners and anyone else who has bothered actually to ensure they are informed before voicing their opinions, I doubt it will contain anything we don’t already know but I think it will be a huge…
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Badger survey, June
A slightly unusual survey this time, in response to a planning permission application. We thoroughly checked woodlands managed by an outfit called Euroforest who are not averse to putting up some pretty strident signs: “STOP! Do not go further …”, no doubt for valid health and safety reasons, as they had been doing a lot…