European Badger (Meles meles): Facts, Setts and Diet

Appearance

A European badger is built for digging. It has a small, wedge-shaped head, a thick neck, a broad, low body and short, powerful legs. Each foot has five toes with long, strong claws on the front feet that work like shovels. The tail is short and pale.

The face is the badger’s trademark: a white head with two broad black stripes running from the nose over the eyes and small white-tipped ears. The body fur looks gray from a distance, but each coarse guard hair is pale with a dark band, while the legs and underparts are black. Rare color forms occur, including pale albino or leucistic badgers and reddish “erythristic” badgers, where the black parts are sandy red.

Badgers have small eyes and rather poor eyesight, but an excellent sense of smell, which they use to find food, recognize each other and mark territory.

How big is a European badger?

The European badger is one of the largest land members of the weasel family in Europe, beaten only by the wolverine.

Boars (males) are slightly larger than sows (females) and have broader heads. Weight changes a lot with the seasons. Badgers fatten up through late summer and autumn and can be close to half as heavy again in autumn as in spring in colder regions. The heaviest verified badger weighed about 27 kg (60 lb).

Habitat and range

European badgers live across most of Europe, from Ireland, Britain and Portugal east to the Volga River in Russia, and from southern Scandinavia and Finland south to the Mediterranean, including Crete. East of the Volga they are replaced by the Asian badger, and in the Caucasus and Middle East by the Caucasian badger, which were once treated as the same species.

The ideal badger landscape is a patchwork: woodland, hedgerows or scrub where the soil is easy to dig, next to pasture and fields where earthworms are plentiful. Sloping ground with well-drained, sandy or loamy soil is especially popular for setts. Badgers also live in farmland, upland valleys up to about 2,000 m (6,600 ft), and increasingly in the edges of towns, gardens, railway banks and city parks.

What do European badgers eat?

Badgers belong to the order Carnivora but are true omnivores. Their most important food in most of Europe is earthworms, which they slurp from the surface of grass fields and lawns on mild, damp nights. On a good night, a badger can eat hundreds of worms.

They also eat beetles, leatherjackets and other insect larvae, wasp and bumblebee nests, fruit such as blackberries, apples and plums, cereals such as wheat and maize, bulbs, roots and fungi. Small mammals such as young rabbits and voles, frogs, birds’ eggs, carrion and occasionally hedgehogs are also on the menu. An adult usually eats no more than about 0.5 kg (1.1 lb) of food a night. For the full picture, see what do badgers eat?

Behavior: clans, setts and nightlife

The European badger is the most social of the world’s badgers. It usually lives in clans of about four to eight adults, with records of up to about 23 animals, plus cubs. Each clan defends a territory that may be as small as 30 hectares (74 acres) in rich farmland or 150 hectares (370 acres) or more in poorer country. Territory borders are marked with latrines, shallow pits where badgers leave droppings, and with scent from a gland under the tail. Clan members also scent-mark each other, building a shared group smell.

Home is the sett, a system of tunnels and chambers dug into the ground. Big main setts can have dozens of entrances and be used by generations of badgers for decades or even centuries. Badgers are very clean: they bring in fresh bedding of grass, bracken and leaves, and they drag out old bedding to air or replace it. Learn more in what is a badger sett?

Badgers are mainly nocturnal. They leave the sett around dusk, groom, play and then follow well-worn paths to feeding areas. They make a range of sounds, including growls, barks, a bubbling “purr” between mothers and cubs and loud screams during fights.

Reproduction and cubs

Badgers can mate at almost any time of year, but most mating happens in late winter and spring. They use delayed implantation: the fertilized egg stays dormant in the female and only implants in the womb around December, followed by about seven weeks of pregnancy. As a result, nearly all cubs are born underground between mid-January and mid-March, peaking in February.

Litters are usually one to five cubs, most often two or three. Cubs are born pink with silky gray fur and closed eyes and weigh only about 75–130 g (2.6–4.6 oz). Their eyes open at about five weeks, and they first come above ground at about eight weeks, in April or May. They are weaned at around three months but often stay with their clan for life, especially females. In many clans only one or a few sows raise cubs each year, and other clan members may help guard and groom the young.

Cubs spend early summer evenings playing near the sett entrance, wrestling, chasing and climbing over adults, which is when they are easiest to watch. By autumn they are almost adult size and foraging for themselves.

Winter: do badgers hibernate?

European badgers do not truly hibernate. In autumn they build up fat and line their setts with bedding. In cold weather they stay underground for days at a time, becoming less active and living off their fat, but they wake easily and come out on mild nights. In the far north and east of the range, badgers may stay below ground for several months. The details are explained in do badgers hibernate?

Lifespan, predators and threats

Most wild badgers live only a few years, often less than five, but some reach about 14–15 years. Many cubs die in their first year from food shortage in dry springs, disease or attacks by other badgers.

Adult badgers have few natural predators. Wolves, Eurasian lynx, brown bears, large dogs and golden eagles (which take cubs) can kill them, but such deaths are rare. Far more die on roads; in Britain, traffic kills tens of thousands of badgers every year. Other threats include illegal persecution, sett destruction during building work and, locally, loss of habitat to intensive farming.

Conservation status and legal protection

The IUCN Red List classifies the European badger as Least Concern, with a large and generally stable population that is increasing in parts of Western and Central Europe. In Central Europe, numbers recovered after rabies, against which many badgers were once gassed, was brought under control.

In the UK, badgers and their setts are protected by the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, which followed centuries of persecution and the cruel, now illegal practice of badger baiting. Badgers can carry bovine tuberculosis, which also infects cattle, and in England a large-scale government cull of badgers has run since 2013 in parts of the country. The cull remains highly controversial, and vaccination of badgers is used as an alternative in some areas.

Myths and facts about badgers

• Myth: Badgers have shorter legs on one side. An old folk belief held that badgers had legs of different lengths so they could run along hillsides. The 17th-century writer Sir Thomas Browne already listed it among popular errors, and it is simply untrue.
• Myth: Badgers are a kind of bear. Linnaeus did first name the species Ursus meles, placing it with the bears, but badgers belong to the weasel family, Mustelidae, along with otters, martens and stoats.
• Myth: Badgers regularly kill lambs and chickens. Badgers occasionally raid poultry or, very rarely, kill a lamb, usually when food is short in late winter. Most badgers never do, and foxes are often the real culprits when remains are found near a sett.
• Fact: Badgers eat hedgehogs. They are one of the few animals able to open a rolled-up hedgehog, and where badgers are common, hedgehogs tend to be scarcer. Habitat loss and roads, however, are bigger problems for hedgehogs overall.
• Fact: Badgers are fussy housekeepers. They change their bedding, keep toilets outside in latrines and may even air bedding outside the sett on dry mornings.

Badgers and people

Badgers have a strong place in European culture, from Mr. Badger in The Wind in the Willows to the old English name “brock”. They are popular with wildlife watchers, and many local badger groups in Britain organize evening watches at setts. If you hope to see one, find a quiet spot downwind of a sett before dusk, keep still and quiet, and never block entrances or disturb the animals. Badgers share their setts surprisingly often with other animals, including red foxes and rabbits. Their distant relative, the honey badger of Africa and Asia, has a very different reputation.