In this weeks Badger Blog Eddie Palmer from Scottish Badgers talks about the effects of human development on badgers.

THE EFFECT OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT ON BADGERS

By the above, we usually mean the effects of mankind building roads and buildings (and railways, see HS2!), plus the rural impact of agriculture and forestry. All are supposed to have mitigating policies to ease the pressure on wildlife, ….but do they work?

Badgers have been persecuted for centuries, to the point of near extinction in many parts of Great Britain. Badger-baiting, in which badgers are set against dogs in a pit, along with bear-baiting was made illegal in 1883. However, little changed. Snaring, shooting and digging persisted as part of Victorian game keeping practices and it was only the first world war that allowed some recovery of the population. The 1973 Badgers Act gave limited protection but allowed landowners to continue to kill badgers. Through the 1980’s various legal protections were added but were ineffectual, resulting in the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, which outlaws interfering with the sett of a badger and thereby allows the law enforcement authorities more effectively to investigate badger crime. However, over the subsequent two decades further legal amendments had to be introduced to try to stem the continuation of this very persistent crime².

It is now illegal to dig badgers at all, the onus is on the person wanting to do something that might interfere with a badger sett to prove that their proposed activities will not so interfere, whether recklessly or deliberately, and any person who causes or permits such activity can be held accountable. It has taken the considered input of many people and all sectors of society to reach this point. It should be a success to be welcomed if the badger population is making a recovery – a recovery that is coming from a very low baseline (extinction in some areas) and has been held back over a century while criminal activities continued to flout the law.

History shows that recovery in badger numbers is contingent on stronger laws being in place; there is no argument to dismantle the hard-won progress of so many sectors in society over so many decades, particularly when success has only relatively recently begun.

Research has shown that the that killing of individual badgers can result in the loss of entire social groups. Many areas of suitable habitat still lack badgers or have fragile badger populations. The majority of lowland rural Britain still contains no badgers.

There are significant and increasing pressures on the present badger population including from road deaths (around a fifth of the population are killed every year on our roads), the intensification of agriculture which is associated with the crash in populations of earthworms and insects which form the main part of the badger’s diet and loss of suitable habitat, continued killing by shooting, snaring and other persecution, continued badger-baiting with dogs, and development which cumulatively deprives badgers of suitable areas to find shelter and food.

ROAD DEATHS

This kills most badgers in numbers – basically, as badgers have been with us for thousands of years (the oldest carbon-dated badger bones in the UK have been dated to some 35,000 years ago – they are a very ancient creature), they developed not knowing about motor vehicles and roads.

So, we commence building a road, or buildings nearby, and we take over ancestral clan territory. The poor badger knows nothing of this, ventures out, follows its nose, literally, towards food, and bang, wham! It’s dead.

In Scotland, we collect about 1,200 reports a year of Road Traffic accidents (RTAs), each year, and research has shown often three times the known carcasses at accident hot-spots. So, the number in Scotland each year is possibly some 4,500 – 5,000 deaths.

Mitigation can take place on new roads, by badger territory being researched and identified, and badger paths enabled under roads by tunnels – however, the work in intensive and costly, and can only be about 50% effective. It is highly unlikely that existing roads will be tunneled. Badger setts can also be replaced, and badgers moved. The recently opened Western Aberdeen Peripheral Road had some 19 or so new setts constructed away from the road.

BUILDING DEVELOPMENT

The ‘right way’ of doing this i.e. facilitating badgers to still live, is by ecological surveys for ALL protected species, and by planning of mitigation.  Basically, the good guys, mainly the larger companies, do this right, and others do it wrong. The system is good in its intent, but often poor in practice. Any work near a badger sett requires a licence from the conservation agency (Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, Nature Scot or DAERA in Northern Ireland). Suffice to say that, with all these agencies having been reduced in resources and staff over recent years, the system is far from watertight or satisfactory. Also, the casual observer will able to see that with fines for badger offences (in all four countries) being an average of £800-£1,000, building a house going for £350,000 in the wrong place might be quite a good deal?

FORESTRY

It’s possible that by number of offences, forestry is the most problematic area. Again, rules about how near harvesting of trees can take place  to badger setts are meant to be clear, but it’s often the ‘chain of command’ that does for badgers. An agent acting for a farmer or landowner can make the approach for a licence to disturb badgers, and then the landowner should be aware of any restrictions and act accordingly. Any licence is meant to be on site the whole time of operations.

Too often, this does not happen, and it is the poor (and innocent) machine driver, not informed., who blunders into or on to a sett, and causes damage. Ironically, with carbon capture, and nature restoration now part of daily talk, more trees are being felled now than ever before, trees planted with grants some years ago.

AGRICULTURE

Modern farming practices are one of the main killers of badgers, as many actions reduce badger territory, spraying of weedkiller and herbicides/insecticides obviously endanger all species, and reckless or deliberate use of large machinery

can crush badgers.

If the reader to this wants to know the ‘inside story’ of farming since World War 2, you can do no better than go to ‘English Pastoral’ by James Rebanks, a sheep farmer. He forensically details the concerted wrecking of the British countryside since the fifties due to ‘modern agriculture’.  Before reading this, in Scottish Badgers we were trying to describe farming to groups we went to speak to about badgers, as we were finding systematic destruction of trees, hedgerows, stone walls, and field  boundaries. We had placed farmers in to three groups, according to their behaviour, and James had done the same.

A large ‘middle’ group seemed to us not to be antagonistic to wildlife, but disinterested. James places these as the ‘new businessmen’ – why should they be interested in wildlife when this does not earn them money?

A growing minority, thank goodness, ARE interested, and often gifted naturalists – we come across some lovely people, (women and men) who have bought land, not to farm, but to look after in the best way they can.

The third group you can guess – a minority to whom the solution to any ‘problem’ is to reach for their shotgun. I’ll return to farming in a later blog.

TO COME

• Snaring, game-keeping, shooting
• Badger baiting