Surprise meeting with a badger

Aha thought I, here is a chance for a photograph.

It was early afternoon, brightish daylight, and Brock should have known better.

I was in the centre of a nature reserve, visited by thousands of people and often dogs running wild.

These modern digital cameras allow you to take far too many pictures (which you have to spend time deleting later) so I started snapping away first at 50 yards, then 40, then 30, all the time thinking how lucky can you sometimes get with wild animals.

There was no cover at all out in the meadow so I just kept walking very cautiously forward, snapping away until the memory card was getting near to bursting point.

To my surprise, the animal took not the slightest notice of me, until finally it was a mere five feet away.

This had actually happened ten years ago at 3pm on a bright day in June, before I ever acquired a modern camera. On that occasion the badger had shuffled past me like a grey hoover, sucking up earwigs and woodlice out of the mossy turf.

So too this badger snuffled into the grass, obviously far too hungry to care about humans. I wondered what would have happened had I been a large dog.

It was a young animal, and the palmy days of mother looking after it were long over and now it was on its own. At one point it came within three feet and I also coughed.

It stopped, stared with little piggy eyes at my feet and after deliberating ran off, stopping only ten feet away, and continued hoovering.

Thirty years ago you would never have seen such blatant disregard for safety but now badgers are everywhere, even under my garage, though they have never presented themselves like this. But that feeding technique has me worried.

All over the countryside I see holes in hedgerows and the banks, throughout the woodlands and the meadows where badgers have found the underground nests of one of our most precious resources in the wild - bumblebees.

Around these holes you will see lost bumblebee workers trying to find what has happened to their home. No wonder the bumblebee is becoming more and more scarce.

Not to speak of ground nesting birds like tree pipit, grey partridge, and willow warbler.

Never in human history has the badger been so numerous. Like the deer population it has almost become into pest proportions. But it does make a pretty picture for all that.