Badgers and other Wild Mammals

Badgers

The Euroasian badger, Meles meles, belongs to one of the largest families of carnivores the Family Mustelidae which has 65 species. Its relatives include other animals found in Ireland the stoats, pine martins and otters in addition to the skunks, ferrets and minks. Its range is extensive, badgers can be found all across Europe and Asia, bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and by latitudes at 60 and 35 degrees. Badgers are elusive creatures, only coming out at night, and therefore relatively little is know about their complex social behaviour. Generally badgers live in social groups of 6, but up to 23 individuals in a group has been recorded. Badgers inherit their living areas, or setts, from their parents, as a result some setts can be centuries old. One excavated sett in England revealed 879m of tunnels, 50 chambers and 178 entrances!

With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

Badgers
With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

Badgers

The Euroasian badger, Meles meles, belongs to one of the largest families of carnivores the Family Mustelidae which has 65 species. Its relatives include other animals found in Ireland the stoats, pine martins and otters in addition to the skunks, ferrets and minks. Its range is extensive, badgers can be found all across Europe and Asia, bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and by latitudes at 60 and 35 degrees. Badgers are elusive creatures, only coming out at night, and therefore relatively little is know about their complex social behaviour. Generally badgers live in social groups of 6, but up to 23 individuals in a group has been recorded. Badgers inherit their living areas, or setts, from their parents, as a result some setts can be centuries old. One excavated sett in England revealed 879m of tunnels, 50 chambers and 178 entrances!

With kind permission of the Irish Wildlife Trust

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Badger

Badger[Meles meles]

Lorcan Scott Duchas

Badger
Lorcan Scott Duchas

Badger

Badger[Meles meles]

Lorcan Scott Duchas

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The wider Irish hedgerows accommodate most of the active setts, or complexes of burrows, of Ireland's biggest mammal, the badger. Since the 1970s, in Ireland as in England, the badger has stood accused of carrying the disease of bovine tuberculosis and infecting dairy cattle. Systematic extermination of the animal in several Irish counties appears to correspond with sharp declines in infected cattle. But the island's population of badgers is still among the highest in Europe - an estimated 250,000 adults. The ultimate answer to their co-existence with cattle lies in a programme of oral badger vaccination, the research for which is well-advanced.

The badger's history shows a striking adaptation to a food supply arising from pastoral farming. Five thousand years ago, the animal had a solitary and wide-ranging lifestyle, as it still tends to do on remoter moorland. While the earthworm was a favoured morsel, the badger needed to travel for more scattered and varied food, including insects, carrion and berries. It roamed between small setts and slept under rocks.

As pastoral farming developed, the earthworm population intensified and changed. In lowland cattle pastures, well nourished with dung, the substantial earthworm Lumbricus terrestris became common and plentiful. The badger, a territorial animal, slowly changed its lifestyle to a more sociable grouping. The typical picture of a badger clan in Ireland today is of a group of about six adults, living in a main sett of interconnecting burrows, excavated deep in a dry bank and with half-a-dozen or more entrances. Each group has several smaller, outlying setts within a strongly defended territory of perhaps 200 hectares.

Where badgers are flourishing, hedgehogs tend to disappear - leaving behind, perhaps, spiny coats chewed to the skin and tufted with badger fur. In our mild winter climate, the hedgehog's hibernation is often late and fitfully maintained. The animal may even move between nests - and hedgehogs in the south tend to emerge some weeks ahead of those in the north.

Badger sett

Picture of a badger sett on the slopes of Lybagh mountain over 2000 feet above sea level.Lugnaquillia, is enveloped by cloud in the backround. Although surrounded by granite mountains, the summit is formed of mica schist. (Richard Nairn)

copyright R. Nairn

Badger sett
copyright R. Nairn

Badger sett

Picture of a badger sett on the slopes of Lybagh mountain over 2000 feet above sea level.Lugnaquillia, is enveloped by cloud in the backround. Although surrounded by granite mountains, the summit is formed of mica schist. (Richard Nairn)

copyright R. Nairn

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Fox cubs on the lawn

Photograph of two fox cubs playing on lawn grass in late spring.

Fox cubs on the lawn

Photograph of two fox cubs playing on lawn grass in late spring.

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Some badger setts are shared with foxes, which may even breed in an active main sett. But a more common refuge is in conifer plantations - and, increasingly, in urban parks and gardens. A century ago, foxes were so scarce in some parts of the Irish countryside that they were imported from Britain to provide quarry for fox-hunts. But numbers are now estimated at upwards of 150,000 - this despite the export of up to 35,000 fox pelts a year during the 1970s and 1980s - and few areas of the island remain unvisited by the animal. Its diet varies widely, from earthworms and blackberries to rabbits and young hares, and the hedgerows contribute fledgling birds and the small mammals drawn to thick cover, such as rats and wood mice.

These also attract the stoat, which may den in empty rat burrows or crevices in stone walls. While rabbits may sometimes make up half the stoat's food, it can also spend much of its hunting time up trees, stalking birds and nestlings.

For all of Ireland carnivorous predators, the absence of the field vole (which never reached here from Britain) has encouraged a readiness to eat almost any prey that is encountered, including insects and invertebrates. Our tiniest hedgerow mammal, the pygmy shrew, eats its own weight of insects every day and is itself killed (but rarely eaten) by foxes. For barn owls, however, it is a favourite prey, hunted in the woods and along roadsides.

River banks have been largely ignored as wildlife corridors, but their ecological importance is now clear. In older hill forests, conifers were planted right to the edge of streams, robbing them of sunlight and of the wind-blown mineral and organic debris that supplied much of their nutrients. Now the banks are left open and a more normal fringe of vegetation acts as a buffer to the run-off of forestry fertiliser.

In the lowlands, the banks of some important trout and salmon streams are being planted with native trees, such as willow, as part of river rehabilitation schemes. Insects are important as food for fish, and the willow is host to more insects and mites than almost any other Irish tree. The planting of riverside (riparian) woodland is also encouraged by the Native Woodland Scheme mentioned above.

Hedgehog (Gráinneóg)

Picture shows a Hedgehog

Original work carried out under contract to South Dublin County Council

Hedgehog (Gráinneóg)
Original work carried out under contract to South Dublin County Council

Hedgehog (Gráinneóg)

Picture shows a Hedgehog

Original work carried out under contract to South Dublin County Council

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Common Tern

The common tern (Sterna hirundo) is one of 5 terns that visit Ireland. Terns look like small gulls, with a silvery grey and white plumage, but have long pointed wings. The common tern has a red bill that is black tipped. They are very graceful in flight, and often hover over water before diving in to catch small fish and sand eels. There are approximately 100 colonies in Ireland, situated mostly in coastal areas such as rocky islands, shingle beaches or salt marshes. Tern arrive here in late April from the coast of west Africa and lay one clutch of up to 3 eggs. Most chicks have fledged by early August and are ready to leave for Africa by mid - late September. The average lifespan of the common tern is 33 years. It is now on the amber list of birds of conservation concern in Ireland.

Common Tern

The common tern (Sterna hirundo) is one of 5 terns that visit Ireland. Terns look like small gulls, with a silvery grey and white plumage, but have long pointed wings. The common tern has a red bill that is black tipped. They are very graceful in flight, and often hover over water before diving in to catch small fish and sand eels. There are approximately 100 colonies in Ireland, situated mostly in coastal areas such as rocky islands, shingle beaches or salt marshes. Tern arrive here in late April from the coast of west Africa and lay one clutch of up to 3 eggs. Most chicks have fledged by early August and are ready to leave for Africa by mid - late September. The average lifespan of the common tern is 33 years. It is now on the amber list of birds of conservation concern in Ireland.

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Two mammals that depend on riparian corridors are aquatic relatives, in the mustelid family, of the badger, stoat and pine marten. Mustelids are all sharp-toothed carnivores with short, powerful legs, and the otter and mink add webbed feet and streamlined, muscular bodies.

Only at Europe's Atlantic fringe, and notably in Ireland, does the otter remain a common animal of rivers and lakes and undisturbed coasts and islands. It still fishes near the heart of most of our estuary cities and towns - even, by night, in Dublin's Liffey.

The arterial drainage schemes of the past that widened and deepened many Irish rivers and stripped their banks of trees, cost otters not only their holts and resting places but much of their food supply.

The much smaller American mink, escaping or released from fur farms, has taken some 50 years to reach virtually every corner, coast to coast, of Ireland's waterways. It is now a permanent addition to the island's predators and one which, in its first, dynamic advance, has reduced local populations of waterbirds and wildfowl, and destroyed lake colonies of breeding gulls and terns.

While otter and mink do share some foods, the otter's superior speed and underwater vision has kept the mink more dependent on smaller fish, along with crayfish, frogs and birds. On the west coast, too, the mink finds a different niche among resources, taking crabs and fish from rock pools and rabbits from the dunes.