Badger families keep the same tidy tunnels for decades
The European badger (Meles meles) is a stocky, striped member of the weasel family found from Europe into western and central Asia. Classified as a carnivoran, it actually eats almost anything, and it digs underground homes up to 81 metres long that it keeps remarkably clean.
Badgers are powerfully built, with a small head, tiny black eyes, a short tail and fur mixing black, white, brown and grey. Their weight swings with the seasons, from about 7 to 13 kilograms in spring to 15 to 17 kilograms in autumn, fattening up before their winter sleep. They are nocturnal and social, resting by day in one of several setts in their territory. These burrows have many chambers and entrances, run 35 to 81 metres, and may serve several families for decades. Badgers haul in fresh bedding, clear out soiled material and use latrines placed outside the sett or along routes to neighbouring ones.
Their menu includes earthworms, big insects, small mammals, carrion, cereals and tubers. Up to five cubs are born each spring and, though weaned within months, usually stay with the family. Setts are sometimes shared with rabbits, red foxes or raccoon dogs, yet a provoked badger fights fiercely, a trait once exploited in badger-baiting, a blood sport now banned. Badgers can carry bovine tuberculosis, which can pass to cattle, and England culls them to curb the disease, a policy whose effectiveness is disputed and which some consider cruel.
The species is rated least concern because it is widespread and its large population is stable or growing in places. In Britain it is the only badger, so it is just called the badger. Males are boars, females sows, the young cubs, and a colony is often called a clan.
The name badger is of uncertain origin; the Oxford English Dictionary suggests badge plus -ard, after the white forehead mark, perhaps from the early 1500s, while others propose the French bêcheur, a digger. The older word brock comes from a Celtic term meaning grey. Germanic languages used a root probably linked to building, reflecting the tunnelling, which also gave Latin glosses taxus and thence the Italian tasso and Spanish tejón. Before the mid-1700s English speakers also said pate, grey and bawson, meaning white-striped; Norfolk used badget, southern Ireland earth dog, and Welsh still says mochyn daear, earth pig.
Source: European badger
