I’ve been waiting for a good time to go badger watching at an old, old sett I’ve known for 20 years. I’m hoping for a first sight of this year’s cubs, which begin to emerge around now. An evening after rain is best, before the nettles get too high. In damp ground, the worms might be up and badgers love to forage those, but we haven’t had significant rain in weeks. Tonight will have to do.
I settle against the broad, rough trunk of a favourite oak. The evening is perfectly still, the sun has gone down in a deepening blue sky. The flattened state of the bluebells indicates that the cubs have been out and playing. Housework has also taken place, as two piles of bedding lie airing between the sett entrances, waiting to be taken in. They are mostly composed of wild garlic leaves that double up as fly repellent. The sett has a clean, in-use smell: the cool cathedral scent of scraped chalk earth, the green bacon whiff of claw-shredded elder bark, a warm muskiness. I am relieved to see the sett still active, though badgers do well here.
The birdsong falls away until there is just a mistle thrush and an up-late cuckoo. Pheasants roost noisily in a chorus of stuttered coughing, then all is quiet but for tawny owls.
Soon enough the noises begin: a bumping underfoot, a subterranean knocking-about. Muffled whickering, nasal growls. It is almost too dark to see. My night-adjusted vision is making tree branches imprint on the sky like blinked lightning, and the pale patches of lichen on tree trunks seem to detach themselves and float. An image of a badger’s striped face seems to appear – but turns out to be the twin flowering stems of yellow archangel. From down below, more bumps and bickers. Without the promise of worms to feed on, I don’t think the cubs are allowed out to play.
Finally, a sow badger emerges, shakes off a bloom of chalk dust and trots off into the darkness as if she’s escaped, with one shoe on, from the debris of a party.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
