Badgers, moles and other jungle creatures………

…….. We’ve mentioned before about how living here is like living in the “Wind in the Willows”. One of the locals had explained to us that the badgers were preparing to give birth and so were changing their bedding each night. We had seen evidence of this during the day as we walk past the setts.
Now, one of the ‘badger setts’ on our estate, is huge, it covers a hillock and has masses of entrances with extra entrance holes up to 20 or 30 metres away. We were very surprised to learn that in this condominium type affair (that we call ‘badger city’) there are only about four badgers in residence. We were equally surprised to learn, from the ‘mole man’ (not the skin variety that we are accustomed to), that our present mole infestation, that covers an area of about 2 - 3 acres with little mole hills every couple of feet, is the work of about 3 or 4 moles!!! You never get to see moles above ground, but the other night we decided to go down to the ‘badger sett’ and observe the badgers as it got dark. Badgers are very, very, shy, but if you are lucky and they don’t smell you, you can watch them. So we went down early “sans perfume” and waited. On the way to the sett, we met “Ratty” from W in the W. Ratty is actually a vole and was very cute, his home is the first photo and if you look very carefully you can just see him. We positioned our selves in the hedgerow and after about ½ an hour we had become part of the surroundings and the rabbits and foxes started appearing, but no badgers. About 20 minutes after we’d seen our last fox, I noticed something watching us from within the hedgerow about 15 metres away, and then it came out and stood in the field watching us. We both signaled to each other “what the……..!!!!!”
And with that it bounded across the field out of sight. We had just seen what looked like a lynx, but it was black with a very long tail. “Nobody’s going to believe this!!!!” we decided……but a search on the internet showed ‘panther’ sightings covering a huge radius of about 40 miles. Mmmm…..so the next day we mentioned it tentatively to the other staff, one had seen it in the woods, the others think it’s fanciful…but those of us that have seen it………. we know what we saw…………….
p.s We didn’t see any badgers!!!