The badger visits.

I said to Therese the night before, “One of my lifelong dreams would be to see a badger in real life, so I would do a night hide.” follow barn. In fact, there was a badger sitting there, I could hardly believe my eyes. But the joy quickly faded.

The badger showed behavioral problems. Normally you can’t get within a meter of a badger. One must not forget that this is a larger wild animal.

A never-ending phone call followed. There are hardly any places in Germany that are familiar with badgers. We did not implement suggestions to scare the badger away ourselves, so as not to endanger ourselves and the badger. Badgers are very defensive. We also wanted to help him and not just throw him out the door. There was a very knowledgeable person in the north of Germany and she could at least tell us what we can feed and how a badger behaves.

It’s easy to get information about foxes, squirrels, hedgehogs, etc., but hardly any useful information about badgers. Since they eat everything, we also served our badgers everything.
We didn’t want the animal to suffer, but when he was there on the second day and didn’t touch the food, we asked a hunter what we could do. Two hunters approached. One was clearly a trigger-happy hunter. “He’s ill. We’ll shoot him and the vet can then find out what he’s got.”

We told him unequivocally that we would first examine and then shoot in our yard. Luckily we had the second hunter on our side. The actual hunting tenant said it is a young badger who is very inexperienced, the eyes look good (you can probably tell the state of health by these) and the badger has nothing to see except for the lack of an instinct to flee. So we decided to watch.

We set up cameras and watched him one more night, the food supply was increased a bit. During the night he ate and the next day he put a huge pile in the barn to say goodbye and disappeared.
The responsible hunting tenant assumes that the badger had an infection, which he had to cure and looked for a safe place for it. 😊

Unfortunately, my wildlife camera didn’t trigger that night, the batteries were probably empty. But we have these two pictures as a reminder of these exciting three days.