Badger

A badger is a short legged, heavily built digging mammal of the mustelid family, the same family as weasels, otters and martens. The word is used for several different animals around the world, but in Europe it means the European or Eurasian badger, Meles meles. It is the largest land mustelid in most of Europe, built like a small, low tank: a wedge shaped head, a thick neck, a broad body and powerful front legs armed with long claws for digging. The English name is usually thought to come from badge, a reference to the white mark on its face, and in older English it was called the brock, a word that survives in many British place names. Its best known features are its striped face, its underground homes and its family life, since it lives in clans rather than alone like most of its relatives. Because it is active mainly at night, many people who live near badgers have never seen one, even though their tracks, dung pits and sett entrances are common signs in the countryside.

Badger is not one family of animals but a name given to several groups of digging mustelids that look alike. The genus Meles holds the true Old World badgers. The European badger lives across Europe, the Asian badger (Meles leucurus) replaces it east of the Volga River, across Central Asia, Siberia, China and Korea, and the Japanese badger (Meles anakuma) lives only in Japan. A fourth, the Caucasian badger (Meles canescens), lives in Turkey, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia; many scientists treat it as its own species, while the IUCN still includes it in Meles meles. Outside that genus, the American badger is a flatter, more solitary hunter of the prairies and deserts of North America, and the honey badger of Africa and southern Asia is a famously fearless relative with a black body and a pale gray back. Southeast Asia has the hog badger and several small ferret badgers, while the stink badgers of Indonesia and the Philippines actually belong to the skunk family.

The European badger is about the size of a medium dog but built much lower to the ground. Adults measure roughly 60 to 90 centimeters from nose to rump, with a short, bushy tail of 12 to 20 centimeters, and stand only 25 to 30 centimeters at the shoulder. They usually weigh 7 to 14 kilograms in spring, but in autumn, after weeks of feeding, big males can reach about 17 kilograms. Males, called boars, are a little larger than females, called sows, and have broader heads. The coat looks gray from a distance, but each hair is pale with a dark band, which gives a grizzled effect. The legs and underside are black, and the white head has two black stripes running from the nose over the eyes and ears, which probably warn predators that this animal can defend itself. Badgers are not blind, but their eyesight is poor, and they rely instead on a superb sense of smell and good hearing. Their front claws can be over 2 centimeters long.

European badgers live across almost the whole of Europe, from Ireland, Britain and Portugal in the west to European Russia in the east, and from southern Scandinavia and Finland to the Mediterranean. They are absent from Iceland and the far north, and east of the Volga River the Asian badger takes their place. Badgers that live in Turkey, the Caucasus and the Middle East are often counted in this species too, although many scientists now call them the Caucasian badger. Their favorite landscape is a mix of deciduous woodland, hedgerows and open fields, where wooded slopes give them dry, easily dug soil for their setts and nearby pastures are full of earthworms. They also live in coniferous forest, scrub, river valleys, sand dunes and Mediterranean maquis, from sea level up to about 3,300 meters, and in many places they have moved into farmland, parks, railway banks and the edges of towns. What they avoid are waterlogged ground, where setts would flood, and huge open areas with no cover.

A badger's home is called a sett, and it is one of the most impressive structures built by any European mammal. A main sett can have from a handful to dozens of entrances, linked by tunnels that run for tens or even hundreds of meters and lead to sleeping chambers lined with bedding. Badgers dig in well drained soil, usually on a slope, at a woodland edge or under a hedge, and keep expanding their setts over the years; some large setts in Britain are thought to have been used for centuries. An entrance is easy to recognize: a wide, rounded hole about 25 to 30 centimeters across, with a large heap of excavated earth in front. Badgers are very clean. They regularly drag out old bedding and carry in fresh grass, bracken and leaves, holding it between their chin and front legs as they shuffle backward. They also dig shallow pits used as latrines along the borders of their territory. Old setts are often shared with foxes and rabbits, and in Britain setts are protected by law.

Badgers are omnivores and true opportunists, but in much of northern and western Europe one food stands out: earthworms. On damp, mild nights a badger can eat hundreds of worms, slurping them up from short grass in pastures and lawns, and in some British studies worms made up well over half of the diet. Badgers also eat beetles and their larvae, slugs and snails, and they dig out the nests of wasps and bumblebees to eat the grubs, protected by their thick coat. In late summer and autumn they turn to blackberries, cherries, plums, apples and acorns, and they raid fields of maize and wheat. Animal prey includes young rabbits dug out of their burrows, mice, voles, frogs and the eggs and chicks of ground nesting birds. Badgers are among the few predators able to eat hedgehogs, which they unroll with their strong claws. In the dry Mediterranean south, where worms are scarce, they rely much more on insects, olives, figs and rabbits.

European badgers are the most social members of the mustelid family. They live in groups called clans, which in Britain typically hold around four to eight adults plus the year's cubs, though some clans in rich habitat have twenty or more members. Each clan shares a main sett and defends a territory around it, marking the borders with dung and with a strong smelling secretion from a gland under the tail. Clan members also scent mark each other, which builds a shared group smell. Badgers usually come out around sunset and return before dawn. On leaving the sett they often groom and play before heading off to forage, mostly alone, along well worn paths. Although they look slow, they can run at up to about 30 kilometers per hour over short distances, and they swim well. Their sounds range from purrs between mothers and cubs to growls and loud screams during fights. In cold winters they stay underground for long periods, living on their fat, but they do not truly hibernate.

Badger cubs begin life with one of the strangest tricks in mammal reproduction: delayed implantation. Badgers can mate at almost any time of year, though most matings happen in spring, but the fertilized egg does not attach to the womb straight away. It waits for months, and implantation usually happens in late December or early January, whatever the date of mating. About six to seven weeks later, cubs are born underground, mostly in late January and February. A litter usually has two or three cubs, occasionally up to five. Newborns are about 12 centimeters long, pink, with fine gray fur and closed eyes, which open after about five weeks. They spend roughly their first eight weeks deep in the sett and first come out in late April or May, when they can be seen playing at the entrance on spring evenings. They are weaned at around three months and are almost full grown by autumn. On average only about one in three cubs survives its first year.

In Britain and Ireland, the badger is at the center of one of Europe's longest running wildlife controversies. Badgers can carry bovine tuberculosis and pass it to cattle, and cattle to badgers, on shared pastures. In England, large scale licensed culling began in 2013 and spread to many counties, and campaign groups estimate that more than 250,000 badgers were killed. Scientists disagreed sharply about how much it helped, partly because culling can push surviving badgers to move around more and spread infection. The government has now moved to vaccination and stronger cattle measures: the last cull licenses ended in January 2026, no culling is planned in England in 2026, and badger vaccination is being expanded, with the aim of making England free of the disease by 2038. In Ireland, badgers have been removed in areas with high TB rates while vaccination has grown since 2018. Wales has relied on vaccination and cattle controls, and Scotland is officially free of bovine TB.

The IUCN lists the Eurasian badger as Least Concern. Nobody has counted all of Europe's badgers, but they are common in much of the continent, and one study estimated roughly 391,000 to 581,000 in England and Wales alone, a big increase since the 1980s. The picture is not equally good everywhere. In the Netherlands, numbers fell to about 1,500 in the 1980s before legal protection and badger tunnels under roads helped them recover to some 5,000 to 6,000. Adult badgers have few natural predators: wolves, lynx and brown bears can kill them, and eagles and eagle owls sometimes take cubs. By far the biggest killer is road traffic, which takes tens of thousands of badgers a year in Britain alone. Other threats include the loss of hedgerows and woodland to intensive farming, culling linked to bovine tuberculosis, hunting in parts of eastern Europe and Russia, and illegal persecution such as badger baiting, banned in Britain under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992.