Amazingly Tough Badger

By Mike Sturk

The life-and-death drama started unfolding seconds after I drove up to the snow-covered field in southwestern Alberta.

First thing I saw was a badger eyeing a gopher. Perfect; my years-long quest to photograph a badger out hunting was about to pay off.

Several weeks earlier, a friend had told me about seeing a badger in a pasture near High River. It reportedly shared the field with gophers, bald and golden eagles, hawks, coyotes and a long-tailed weasel, a smaller member of the same mustelidae (weasel) family as the badger.

I've always found badgers fascinating, for the same reason I find owls fascinating; they're mysterious. Like most owls, badgers hunt mainly at night, and therefore spend much of their lives unobserved by people. They're both curmudgeonly night-hunting loners.

BADGERS CAN BE HARD TO PHOTOGRAPH.

Although I'd seen and photographed badgers in southeastern Alberta, I hadn't seen one since moving in 2009 to High River, at the edge of the foothills. I'd started to doubt my spotting skills. After all, with bodies weighing up to 30 pounds on a three-foot-long frame, badgers should be easy to spot.

When my friend alerted me to the one last spring, I got on the case immediately but it vanished into its den as soon as I showed up. The routine repeated itself many times over a six-week period. Although I did have photo opportunities, the badger was usually too far away for a good shot.

That all changed the day I found the badger intently eyeing the gopher instead of me. I had just raised the camera when suddenly the badger took chase. It crashed through the snow's crust but kept going, plowing through the wet, white stuff. The snow slowed the badger's progress enough to allow the gopher to escape down a hole.

In those few fast and furious seconds I snapped off several frames and was rewarded with a once-in-a-lifetime photograph.

For reasons unknown, the badger declined to dig out the gopher. It was lucky for the gopher. The small rodent likely would have been toast. A badger tenaciously digging out prey is a sight to behold. Powerful shoulders, strong sharp claws and a body built low to the ground combine to create a natural digging machine. Dirt flies as if being thrown by a man wielding a shovel.

THEY DON'T BACK DOWN.

This tenacity has helped badgers gain a reputation for ferocity much like its larger relative, the wolverine.

Long-time friend Tom Beck told me that once when he was out horseback riding he encountered three young badgers that he thought would scurry off. Instead, they snarled, bared their teeth and stood their ground.

Badgers will even challenge a car. A few years ago, near Dorothy, Alta., I came across a family of three on a gravel road. They bared their teeth, got their hackles up and started running towards my compact car. I backed up.

Badgers are notorious throughout their home range, which includes all four Western provinces, for not backing down from a fight. When I was watching that field near High River last spring, a young coyote wandered too close to the badger. The smaller badger lunged at it, sending the coyote running away with its tail between its legs.

Sometimes badgers and coyotes work together to capture prey, with a coyote pouncing on a gopher escaping from an exit hole while the badger is excavating the main entry. Conversely, gophers will sometimes stay in their dens if they know a coyote is waiting at a hole, rewarding the diligent badger as it digs out its prey. I also read of a time two coyotes ganged up on and killed a badger.One fight they're losing.

Alberta's 2002 badger population was estimated at 10,000 and they're going to need all the toughness they can muster to survive a disappearing habitat and landowners who either shoot or trap them, with a lot of that undoubtedly going unreported. And more cars on more roads mean more badgers wind up as road kill.

Albertans have hunted badgers for their pelts for years. According to Operation Grassland Community, 18,000 badger pelts were sold in Alberta in 1928 at an average price of $49 (over $600 in today's money!).

In 2000-2001, 170 badger pelts were sold for $20-$25 each, according to a study by Dave Scobie for the Alberta Conservation Association and Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. Trappers in Alberta were asked to turn in badger carcasses and 170 were submitted in the 2009-2010 season. Pelts sold for an average of $74 each.

Badgers in Alberta are ranked as a sensitive species, which means they aren't endangered at the moment but may need help at some point to maintain healthy populations. Scobie suggested badgers be removed from the list of furbearers so they cannot be trapped.

The Alberta government allows landowners to kill them by hunting or trapping, without a licence and during all seasons, on privately-owned land. The decision is left to the landowner, and when it comes to badgers the attitude varies.

Manitoba and Saskatchewan both allow regulated trapping but not hunting. British Columbia prohibits both.

FRIEND OR FOE?

Some landowners routinely shoot badgers because they dig holes in fields – injuring livestock that steps into them – and because they'll fight farm and ranch dogs when they feel threatened.

Veterinarians I asked confirmed that some cattle and horses are injured in holes, but it's usually difficult to tell if gophers or badgers dug them. Vets also reported that although altercations between badgers and dogs do occur, they are not as common as dog/porcupine encounters.

Westerners familiar with the modern-day Dachshund, the wiener dog, might be as surprised as I was to learn the breed was bred specifically to hunt badgers. Dachshund is German for badger dog and, according to the American Kennel Club, it was first bred in the 1600s to be "a fearless, elongated dog that could dig the earth from a badger burrow and fight to the death with the vicious badgers.

When I mentioned photographing badgers to one farmer, he replied that I should shoot them but not with a camera. Another said some ranchers put out poison, shoot or trap them when they appear on their land.

One rancher said he didn't mind them because they control gophers and he'd feel lucky to see one. He carefully watches for holes on his land when he's out riding his horse.

Survival of the badger, as it stands now, depends a lot on perspective.