Top 5 trail camera captures - Badgers
Through our projects and product testing, we at NatureSpy are lucky enough to have captured thousands of trail camera clips in the UK and around the world.
From these we have picked out 5 of our favourite clips of badgers - those including funny behaviours, rare moments, or particularly clear and beautiful captures. See below for a peek into the private lives of these fascinating creatures…
1. Captured during our very own Yorkshire Pine Marten Project in 2021. Through our years of camera trapping, we have only been lucky enough to catch badgers in daylight on a handful of occasions. This beautiful video with a group (known as a clan or a cete) of badgers is therefore quite a treat! Recorded using a Recon Force Advantage camera (the preceder of the Elite HP5), the quality is impressively clear.
2. This badger was rather an unexpected guest, only just squeezing into a small mammal camera box. These boxes are designed to encourage mice, shrews and voles into the perfect position for a trail camera trigger. The camera in question was placed at a school in North Wales as part of a NatureSpy run camera trapping workshop. The pupils and staff were eager to discover which small mammal species lived on site, but instead had this rather larger visitor show up for a free meal.
3. A bit of a wildcard addition to our top 5! Rather than our European badger, this clip includes two honey badgers (Mellivora capensis) exploring Shinganda Wildlife Wilderness - one of our NatureSpy supported projects. Honey badgers are another species in the mustelid family, although are awarded the name 'badger' due to their fossorial lifestyle, rather than being particularly closed related to their European cousin. Honey badgers are not a very common capture, therefore this clear clip is a worthy member of our top 5!
4. Another clip from our Yorkshire Pine Marten Project recorded in the project's first year, 2018. Eggs were placed as bait* to determine the presence of Pine Martens on the North York Moors, but also encouraged many other species to stop for a snack. We recorded plenty of foxes, birds and rodents at this same spot, but this badger was by far the most determined individual.
5. Although not the sharpest video on our records (taken in 2015), this clip never fails to make us smile. European badgers are sociable and playful animals, and often will exhibit play-fighting within their clan. iWild North Wales was our first fully funded project (with thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund) 7 years ago. 3200 wildlife records were gathered in total from parks and nature reserves around North Wales, including around 500 of badgers. The clan captured above surprised us all by their high levels of activity, despite being surrounded by a housing estate with plenty of humans walking nearby.
To learn more about the projects we work with and support, check out our project pages.
When targeting badgers with camera traps it is essential to remember that they are covered by the ‘Protection of Badgers Act 1992’ - any disturbance of badger setts is illegal. Being present on a sett can be considered as disturbance and should be considered carefully when choosing the placement of camera/s.
All footage included in this blog was captured using either Browning or Bushnell wildlife cameras.
