Badgers Applaud the British Athletes at Sochi

My daughter ran her very first half marathon this morning at the very first Hampton Court Half Marathon. When she had finished, she gave me a tinkle on the phone saying she had beaten her personal best for this distance by a whole 10 minutes and clocked in at an impressive 1h30. The excitement in her voice was palpable.  She had done it and the medal I feel sure, will be a reminder of the day for ever. All money that Sophie raises through this half marathon is to be donated to Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals, so let us hope she raises pounds. Sophie is in her second year at King’s College London studying medicine, a fact which her mother and I are extremely proud of.

Also this week, my son Samuel has received an offer to study agriculture at The Royal Agricultural University of Cirencester.  This also makes his mother and myself very proud. 

I did not feel able to attend the half marathon as leaving the badgers would have been as unsettling for me as it could be dangerous for the badgers. Badger baiting has been known in the area and their protection is top priority so alas, I had to stay home. You can never be too careful in the cubbing season. They are so very vulnerable and will not move from their setts. They guard their young in a vice like fashion, making their digging out all the more easier once detected by the dogs. 

The Sochi Winter Olympics was a fantastic success to anybody’s measure. The professionalism in it all has been quite breath taking, truly an amazing job of work and our own British success beyond their wildest dreams. But the blood on the streets of Kiev in the Ukraine did an awful lot to knock the shine off the whole issue for me.  A hundred years has passed us by since the Great War. The war that was supposed to end all wars and in its way made the atrocities in Kiev all the more disturbing. A smile on the face of the Russian Bear, the day Ukraine got its independence.  Now half of the country looking towards Europe and the other half looking back towards the old Motherland, Russia. The old Russian Bear now grimaces. Ukrainians spilling the blood of their brothers on the streets in pitched battles while the rest of us watched one of the greatest winter Olympic show cases of all time. And, of course, how can one possibly think of Sochi without being reminded of the country’s abominable LGBT policies. Yet another taint on the otherwise shining winter Olympics.

Matt Frei of Channel Four News showed us all the new palatial home of the former Dictator President along with his personalised Zoo. You can readily see why the great George Orwell’s book, Animal Farm, was banned by the Soviets for so many years. MPs voted to impeach Viktor Yanukovych while another former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko was being released from prison where she had been treated for cancer after being imprisoned on corruption charges. Statues of Lenin continue to be toppled throughout the old Soviet Union but until the powers that be put to bed once and for all that ‘all people are equal but some people are more equal than others,’ then quite simply, George Orwell’s Animal Farm is as relevant today as the day it was written.

The phrase of the Great War, ‘The War to end all wars’, reads very shallow when you look at wars continuing on a month on month basis: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Gaza and the African Congo. Life is being lost, measured in their thousands. The lessons of yesterday have just not been learnt. The Cotswold badgers, however, remain in a very harmonious state.

The badgers have missed the snow this winter, so their skeleton skills are no longer up to speed. No Sochi for this sett.

The Honourable Daddy Cool

The fierce, powerful storms of the winter at last seem to be over.  Days are now calmer however, we still get the rain but the amounts are a lot more moderate.  The floods are subsiding and the few hours of sunshine between the showers is most welcome and really quite spring-like.  

There has been a few fallen trees up in the woods and around the badger sett but the ferocity of the storms, I honestly was expecting there to be a lot more.  

As I sit and watch the badgers, the sows getting ever nearer to cubbing down, my thoughts are taken away almost sending a silent ‘get well soon’ to a truly great politician, Tony Benn who has been hospitalised these last few days after feeling unwell on Saturday evening and now the reports are sadly that his condition is serious.  The word ‘honest’ and ‘politician’ do not readily go hand in hand but Tony Benn was the exception to the rule, he was honest and extremely honourable.  Some might say the last of a dying breed, the old school politician.

Also in the news this week Tony Blair, another Labour politician whose values seem to be a million miles away from Tony Benn's.  Apparently six days before Rebekah Brooks was arrested he had offered her advice on how to handle the phone hacking scandal.  I would have thought he would have had enough to do out in the Middle East with the ongoing tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians for that is supposed to be his role since leaving British politics, Middle East Peace Envoy. 

As I listen to the various news teams reporting on horrific news turbulences throughout the world I could almost be excused for thinking the whole hullabaloo about the British badger is a very small molehill in amongst mountains of catastrophe, but surely, the mountains of catastrophe are made monumental by bad decisions, deceit and downright dishonesty, The Iraq war springs to mind.  But a comparison can be drawn, albeit nowhere near to the same scale between the badger cull of 2013 and the Iraq war, but both situations were brought about by mis-information.  Information and statistics produced solely to promote the government of the day point of view.  

My badger film this week shows two badger sows out in driving rain showing signs of anxiousness, getting quite close to cubbing down.

Daddy Cool can be seen at the end of the film scent marking his territory close to the sett.  Now his presence is more important than ever.  The sows take their safety  as a given for their welfare is in the most honourable of hands, Daddy Cool, Lord Protector of our Woodlands. 

A short film of badger sows and the Honourable Daddy Cool 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcXaIWwtuds&feature=youtube_gdata

An anxious badger sow a few days off from cubbing down.

They Shoot Badgers Don’t They?

Wales conjures up for me one of the greatest rugby sides I have ever seen. Their rugby team in the early seventies was an education in the sport. The deprivation left behind after the closure of the coal pits bringing about a melt-down in so many mining communities.

This week however, the most encouraging news came out of Wales through figures released by Defra showing that Wales’ Bio-Security measures combined with a very small scale badger vaccination was astonishingly successful.  Wales are once again in the mix punching above their weight. 

Owen Paterson addressed parliament on the 2^nd September 2013 stating that BTB is the most pressing problem in the farming community in the UK and that the disease was worsening and spreading across the country.  He told the House that the last ten years BTB had cost the tax payer five hundred million pounds and if left unchecked this would rise to one billion over the next ten years. 

On the 9^th September 2013 he released a further statement confirming that the badger culls were underway repeating that BTB is the most pressing animal problem in the UK.  To say that this was an over-statement is an under-statement for quite simply, Own Paterson and Defra were quite wrong and I would almost say, they were misleading the House. 

In mid-January, Defra’s silently released news over-stating the figures for the incidents of Bovine TB due to glitches in data entries.  Those glitches going back to September 2011.  With the official figures being revised significantly downwards showing us all that BTB was nowhere near as prevalent in our herds as first stated.  No wonder the news this week was released with as little fanfare or press release as these figures contradict every statement we have heard from Defra and Owen Paterson over the last two to three years.  The old figures from Defra covering England, Wales and Scotland separately state, that from September 2012 to September 2013, Bovine TB had increased in herds by 18%.  Figures released this week show the exact opposite and that in this same time period there had been an actual reduction of 3.4%, so at the very time Paterson was claiming justification of the barbaric badger cull telling us how out of control the disease was and how it was spreading across the country was something that only a badger cull could halt.  The reality of the situation was, BTB infected cattle were actually falling. 

Wales has independently adopted a no cull Bio-Security and vaccination programme on some cattle farms as early as 2008.  Badger vaccination against TB in intensive action areas, North Pembrokeshire, parts of Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire which began in May 2012.  Wales withdrew from the badger cull commitment to vaccination.  This was announced by the Welsh Environment Minister, John Griffiths in March 2012. 

Now we know Wales was right. Plaid Cymru and the Conservative politicians must surely now apologise for their misleading statements and above all, their unjust assault on a British icon. 

Owen Paterson has misled the House in a most serious and dishonourable fashion and must therefore explain how something so cruel and barbaric on the basis of total ignorance can be passed as British law. 

All through the culling campaign, the most common phrase I was continually hearing was ‘the government hasn’t met their targets in the culling zone for dead badgers.’ The numbers were not being met in the cull zones simply because, as I have always stated, badger numbers in the British Isles are nowhere near as plentiful as some people would have you believe. 

I listen to nonsense from both sides of the argument about how badgers have been flooded out of and even drowned in their setts in these monsoon-like weather conditions.  The reality and truth of the matter is, I have studied badgers for forty years.  I have been around badgers for the whole of my life time and nature I have studied as a love and an education.  Badgers don’t make setts on flood plains.  There was a lesson to be learnt on this forty years ago by our planning departments and our county councils.  If they had looked more towards the badger who is arguably without doubt, nature’s greatest engineer.  You would not have all the misery of the flooded homes that we have been seeing day after day on our television sets. 

Badgers, moles, voles, hedgehogs do not drown, they up sticks and they simply move on.  The badger is one of nature’s true survivors, knock back after knock back but he is still left standing.

Nature’s knock backs, the wildlife adapts, evolves, gets on with whatever is on the plate in front of it but the type of knock back we saw in 2013 was quite simply not cricket. Unfair and unjust. The badger cull created a situation in which the badger is unable to tolerate or come to terms with. The damage done will be years in the making good.  My fear is, if these ignorant people, the ones responsible for bringing about these disastrous and in my honest opinion, criminal acts against wildlife continue to massage figures and hide reality behind red tape just to suit their misguided, farcical ideology then the badger could become yet another animal that we used to see, like the river otter, the water vole and the dormouse. 

This morning we are all bathed in beautiful spring-like sunshine.  The birds are in tune and as I walk back from my badger sett I am only too well aware that there is most likely to be new young badger life deep within the setts.

For all those badgers that were so needlessly murdered in the cull there will be no more cubs and no more play fighting for them.  It has all been destroyed by an ignorant, cavalier act. 

Please sign the 131 petitions and protect the remaining badgers where you are and let’s see that between us all we can help to make the government see the gross error that was inflicted on our beautiful countryside in 2013.

As the wind howls overhead and the rain pours down a badger stands defiant not too far from her sett.

Badgers and the Playing Fields of Eton

The Duke of Wellington once famously said, “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”  A lot of water has gone under the bridge since that phrase was first coined.

When I see our Ministers, Lord Smith and even the Prime Minister trudging around in wellington boots and pictures of the afore mentioned playing fields of Eton now a foot deep under water the old phrase of the Duke’s comes back to haunt in quite an astonishing way. 

The Country is being governed by the good old Etonians whose experience in day to day management of large scale enterprises, in particular, the Environment Agency, is showing us all the stark flaws in their colander-like management skills.  But to be fair, the last government did no better. 

As I sit and watch the badgers around the badger sett, a Munkjack hurries by followed by another three.  They know there is a big storm imminent.  The badgers put their heads into the air trying to gauge the time of the storm strike and its severity.  As I watch their behaviour from amongst the beech trees I come to realise the most prudent course of action for me is to withdraw myself from the woodland as it has got clearly very unsafe. 

I thought to myself and I could almost hear, Wellington turning in his grave as the howling, menacing wind roared through the trees filled the woodland with the provoking thought, “Our British Badgers have been lost on the playing fields of Eton.”

Watch my short film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjzV3uiXVig

Badger turning his head to the oncoming wind trying to gauge the ferocity of the storm.

A Badger’s View of a Displaced Retina

In a week that has seen the weather go from bad to worse.  Day after day of constant rain and gale force winds gusting between 40 and 60 MPH, and then being greeted with the news of our Minister for the Environment, Owen Paterson was unable to attend his surveillance of the Somerset Levels sending instead the big cheese of all environmental issues, Lord Smith due to him suffering a detached retina.  I wish Owen Paterson a very successful outcome and a speedy recovery, but I would like to take this opportunity to point out to the government and Lord Smith that killing badgers will do absolutely nothing to alleviate the flooding problems of the South West. But along with it I must add none are so blind as those who won’t see and I am hoping that the Minister on making a full recovery will reconsider his policy on rolling out another totally unjust badger cull. 

I would think, when we all see the amount of misery this recent flooding has caused to so many families and businesses that the priority would be turned to dredging our rivers, investment in coastal defences and a land draining programme that at least equals the work done in the sixties.  Although, a lot of this flooding would have happened no matter what the environment agency would have done but there is no doubt with better environmental management the water would not have hung around for the weeks and weeks that it has, making a lot of peoples’ lives absolutely intolerable. 

Most rivers are only running at best half of their capacity because anything from 35% to 55% is silt and rubbish that has built up over the last thirty to forty years because the sad truth of this is, that since our water boards have been privatised, the maintenance of our rivers has been pretty much non-existent while water bills have gone up year on year. 

Always a conflict of interest.  Investors looking for the biggest dividends, the highest rates of return and the environmentalists looking for the good of nature, the land and the quality of peoples’ lives within it.  For the last ten years the farming community down around the Somerset Levels have been asking the government to look into the drainage problems and invest in drainage works and river dredging to try and protect their livelihoods, but what they got was a rolling out of a badger cull that will not abate the flooding problem neither will it do anything for the BTB predicament.

The millions spent on a futile badger cull would have gone a long way to dredging the River Parrett.  Last Friday I watched as the water crept in to some low lying woodland and a few hedgehogs that had spent the winter in an ‘on and off’ hibernational state due to the mildness of the winter, decided to up sticks and move further up into the woodland.  Although, we have seen the wettest January in 250 years this has surely got to have been one of the mildest winters on record.  When I see the sun which has been so conspicuous by its absence all winter I notice the little clouds of midges that have been present all winter. 

Although, I have told you that my badgers in their badger setts are in the peak of condition, so is everything else.  The seed, the fat balls and other various treats that we put out on the bird station has been nowhere near as much needed this year as in many others.  I have seen a 60% decrease in the amount of seed that I have needed to put out, solely due to the birds being able to find their food elsewhere.  The hedgerow larders have yet to be exhausted.  The reality on the ground is, wildlife have never had it so good. 

The Polecat has pushed the rats on from the badger sett.  Normality within the woodland is once again the order of the day.  Like the hedgehogs, like the rats and our illusive friend, the Polecat, once the sight of survival and wellbeing has been lost it can be so often replaced with uncertainty, doubt, hopelessness, negativity, mediocrity and defeatism.

A female badger just entering her sett in the pouring rain.

Badgers High Five the Lone Spur

The storm is raging really quite violently this evening.  The wind around the house is reminiscent of the noise of a jet engine.  It can be heard from every room in the house.  The winter's weather of rain and wind has been really quite relentless, but surprisingly enough, the damage within the woodlands is remarkably slight.
My last update on the badgers was informing you of an influx of rats into the woodland which was seriously starting to unsettle all the woodland inhabitants, but the welcome appearance of the Polecat was certainly the tonic to the rat situation that I like to think nature had intended.
Dini the fox's diet of late is solely rat and I am sure in his way he thinks he can teach the Polecat a thing or two.  As I sit and watch his ratting technique from a distance within the beech trees he tackles his task with calm, almost surgeon-like attention.  As he gets closer closer his chin two or three inches from the ground he will then spring gazelle like up into the air and come down onto his prey.  A fox ratting is certainly poetry in motion, whereas the Polecat is very much the bull in the china shop approach, espies his prey, doesn't bother with any kind of stealth, just runs straight for it and after it, the result is never in question.  A true ratting master.  And almost as miraculously as the hoards of rats appeared they have now been dispersed in the same breathtaking speed.  The only down side is a sett where a mother badger was going to have her young and the excitement of all the rats and the Polecat and Dini the fox seems to have forced her out and she has now gone fifty yards to the west to dig herself another cubbing chamber on the side of a disregarded sett and what absolutely astounded me was, as I watched quietly from my hide watching her dig ferociously, thinking to myself 'she has got a lot to do here, almost a race against time,' no sooner had I thought it, she was then joined by fellow badgers who seemed to sense the predicament that she was in and started to dig with her, moving bits of fallen timber.  They dug all through the night, hard toil, nature's very own engineers.  Rolling up their sleeves, getting stuck in.
I truly believe this kind of community spirit is needed more today than ever before.
When I listen to the news and hear of more and more food banks and soup kitchens for the poor of this country I ask myself 'why has so much gone so very wrong?'  More working families living in poverty than ever before.  I was once told over dinner a few years ago the poor are as poor now and so full of hopelessness that it does compare to the times in which Charles Dickens lived.
My message to the government, if I may be so bold, instead of killing the badger, if the government looked more closely at a badger's community it might give them a better understanding on how to manage ours.

Please watch my short film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9LeRGTLoNw&feature=youtube_gdata

Badgers are community.

Badgers' Own Pied Piper of Hamlyn

Nature is always awe inspiring. She always has the ability to show grimace as well as breath-taking charm and has always managed without effort to keep me enthralled throughout the whole of my life.  I truly believe the real value of an acre of land is the wildlife that can be sustained within it and this can so often be of no profit at all to the landowner or farmer but absolutely priceless to the most enlightening force on this earth, Nature. 

As the valleys get more and more flooded the voles and the moles and all the small mammals have been moving to higher ground.  The river meadows, the feeding grounds of the Barn owls and the Long-eared owls have been left empty of the owl sustenance. They can now be seen hunting the hedgerows more and more.  Their diversifying behaviour on exploring new hunting grounds to counter balance these almost biblical like down pours is totally inspiring. This winter it has gone on and on and this January has been the wettest January on record.  Since just after Christmas I have noticed the rats in particular move in to the woodlands in ever increasing numbers.  The saying goes, ‘no one being is ever further than three yards away from a rat.’

February, arguably the most important month for the badger.  Any time from the middle of February new badger life is borne into the woodlands.  And as I watched them mid-week, geed up with the news that Shell Oil is pulling out of oil exploration in the Antarctic, the number of rats that were visible around the badger sett seemed quite alarming.  I noticed the build-up more so this last couple of weeks.  It seemed to me the more it rained the more rats were apparent.  Dini the fox didn’t seem to be making much headway in the reduction of numbers which was hardly surprising as the female badgers had fanned out through this hardwood woodland to form their own setts to make ready for their own expectant cubs.  From Daddy Cool’s throne in the North of the woodland to the flooded river meadows to the raging rivers to the South, to me sat here, Dini’s territory seemed huge.  The Tawny owls, the Long-eared owls, the Barn owls were taking the small rats but the big ones were still very much in evidence. 

Daddy Cool, the master of the outfit, the protector, seemed perplexed.  The odd rat around a badger sett was nothing new, but these numbers I could see he was finding difficult to comprehend and was noticeably uncomfortable with the situation.  Daddy Cool, along with a few females would run at the rats, almost trying in a futile way to disperse them.  To me as an onlooker having witnessed the situation get worse, I started to feel concerned for rats in these numbers, if push comes to shove, would, when opportunity arises would be down in the setts and devour the baby badgers.  For that scenario to take place, all that would be needed is, to endure a prolonged cold snap forcing the mother badger out of the sett for food leaving her cubs vulnerable to the rats’ devices. 

One must never intervene with nature because generally speaking nature is even handed.  I remember from years gone by when people weren’t as environmentally savvy as they are today and to protect young trees from squirrel damage landowners would bait the bottom of some trees with rat poison.  The desired effect was always met, it ended the squirrel damage within a weeks or so but along with it, it annihilated everything else within that woodland.  The reduction of our raptors, the Barn owls becoming almost extinct in certain areas, was down solely to the mismanaged use of rat poison.  Once a rat or mouse has had rat poison it makes him dozy, sluggish, and looking for water and so an animal that is normally, solely nocturnal is seen in the daytime often around a puddle of water having to quench his thirst.  Once the rats and mice has broken cover looking for water that is when they become fair game for all of nature’s predators.

 I have always stood against poisons in every form.  They should only be ever used in the most exacting of circumstances, if used at all under license.

The badger cull of 2013 did untold damage to our badger population and I like to think nature has responded to this by giving the badger the kindest winter I can ever remember in forty years of studying badgers.  The badgers are in peak condition but the down side of this, the woodland is now being overrun with rats while escaping this deluge of rain.

As I sat in my hide watching the events unfold, a munkjack then came into view.  He too looked thoroughly unsettled with the rat situation.  A lot of the rabbits appeared also to have moved on, and there was a sense of anticipation, a sense of surprise, almost suspense as the rain again started to fall onto this already sodden ground. Daddy Cool had made his rounds of the woodland, the other badgers had been on their foraging missions, but this night, it was as if they were waiting for an answer from nature to help relieve them from this intolerable plight.

As I sat quietly watching, a couple of rats played the age old game of round and round the mulberry bush and then everything stopped.  The rain was still falling steadily and I expected to see Dini the fox for the rats’ behaviour was that of fright.  I sat there in total stillness and silence, a couple of minutes passed and then it was as if the darkness curtain had been lifted from the woodland and there right in front of me was the lone spur, nature’s very own Piped Piper of Hamlyn, the Polecat.  On seeing him, I could hear my heart sing for nature had sent the equalizer.  Soon normality would once again be the order of the day throughout the woodland.  Daddy Cool’s calls had been answered. 

When one watches a fox on his ratting mission you witness nature’s poetry, its elegance, its prowess, its cunning, its skill, truly mesmerising. But when you witness the ratting technique of a polecat, stoat or weazle you see a master class. Brutality, power, nature’s Exocet missile, a true heat seeker that once on its prey will stop at nothing until his jaws are locked in a vice-like grip on its prey.  If its prey burrows so will the polecat, if its prey climbs so will the polecat, if its prey swims, so will the polecat, if its prey runs so will the polecat and it will run and run and run until it totally exhausts its prey.  A polecat can cover two miles and still kill in the same exactly measured brutal zero tolerance fashion as if it had just awoken from a relaxing sleep. 

I found it quite amazing for polecats have become very rare and are seldom seen in the wild due to years of persecution.  The Victorians used to pay a halfpenny per rat tail to the old ratters of London town.  If this same bounty was given to the polecat he would be the richest animal in the countryside.  Mother Nature seemed to me to be squarely behind the badger, pitting her wits to enable to sustain and stabilize a decreasing badger population, and once again didn’t hesitate to pick up the gauntlet on the badgers’ behalf.

Please watch my short film, Badgers' Own Piped Piper of Hamlyn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l16xUPqDgTo

The 131 anti-cull petition needs more signatures.