Country diary: a close encounter with a badger

Aigas, Highlands: The boulder-like creature snouts for food and carries on with its routine unaware of the watchers nearbyBarely had we let the sediment of evening settle before a badger entered stage right. It trundled to the light and its brindle-haired body was so dome-shaped that it gave the impression not so much of Britain's largest terrestrial predator (after ourselves) as of a boulder moving.Like stone it also seemed rooted, certain of its place and of its unfolding routine - the indifference it showed to the adjacent hide, the assumption that there would be food, and the workaday manner it dismantled the peanut cache. This had been hidden for it in a pine stump and round its root base, but also in pockets cut into a horizontal log capped by heavy rocks. Continue reading...