‘A worm fell into my mouth. I gagged’: my life as a badger
Charles Foster wanted to understand the lives of animals. So he headed to the woods with his son - eating worms, navigating by smell and sleeping in a sett
Burt met us at Abergavenny station. I had my cub with me: Tom, aged eight. Badgers are highly sociable, familial creatures. A lone badger is unthinkable. And Tom, who is profoundly dyslexic and therefore gifted with a dazzlingly holistic, intimately relational view of the world, is, I'd guess, far closer to being a badger than I am. Also, Tom is 4ft 6in. I'm 6ft 3in. Ferns brush his face as they brush a badger's.
We piled into Burt's Land Rover and went to the farm. I had thought of enlarging a disused sett, but I wasn't confident of persuading the police that I wasn't badger digging, and I didn't like the idea of inhaling, along with the good earth of mid-Wales, a huge dose of TB bacilli. Burt's JCB couldn't give us a tunnel, just a deep trench scored into the hill, but it worked very well. We covered the roof with branches and bracken, and sealed it with earth. Burt chugged off down the valley for fishcakes and left us to it. We wriggled inside and tried to be a bit more authentic. We shaped the sett with our paws and a child's beach spade. We tried to scuffle out the earth with our hind legs, but couldn't, because the ceiling was authentically low. Tom could pull the bracken bedding in backwards, like a proper badger, but it was too much for me.
Continue reading...