Badgers and Foxes

Our speculations started three years ago.  For a long time, glimpsing a fox hurrying across our road had been fairly common.  It was the suspected sighting of badger that raised our interest.  Steven related that - taking the late evening air at the end of the drive – he often heard scuffling in the bushes.  But then the badgers would hastily nip across the road and disappear in the neighbour’s garden.

But it wasn’t just that we saw them in the undergrowth of our ‘nature reserve’ garden.  They were living in the rear far corner, burrowed under the high stone wall, throwing up a mound of mud and vegetation, where the foxes had earlier assumed residence.  Yes, foxes and badgers are known to hang around together.

Badgers adopt a wide territory.  It dawned on us that what we call ‘our’ badgers, several other neighbours also feel possessive about.  We do wonder if they’ve dug their sett right underneath the boundary wall and come up in the garden adjacent to ours.  We know that the residential home staff, two doors along the Crescent, put out food for them most nights.  In fact, just yesterday, Mary heard our other neighbour claim that the badger cubs had gone in through her cat-flap and helped themselves to the pet food.

Ah, the cubs.  In these past three years we’ve seen successions of little ones: usually three per annual litter.  They start with scuffling and squeaking in the bushes.  But before long they’re venturing across the front lawn and through to other gardens.  Mary woke up one night recently and watched them in our back garden wandering in and out of her flower pots, taking a drink from the water bowl.  And she's sure they ate all our strawberries.  In all this, we’ve never managed to get a decent photo.

The fox cubs have been just as engaging, and again usually three per spring.  Only, they’re yappy and boisterous.  They crash through the rhubarb; play flight noisily on the back lawn at night, and generally treat the place presumptuously.  

The foxes are more in evidence in the daytime, too.  That’s usual for ‘urban’ inhabitants.  The cubs appear in the evening twilight, and have a good scratch before trotting off.  We’ve noticed that our ‘family’ has a distinctive white tip on their tails.  They get about the district, too, like the badgers.  A neighbour about a quarter of a mile away agrees.

Poppy, our cat, remains disdainful.