In the family way

We're hoping this badger is in the family way, and we can't even prove it's a she-badger.

But she looks feminine, and she is doing all the right things. 



She's spending an awful lot of time in this one burrow at the Chimineas Ranch, and the burrow has a huge tailing of fresh dirt.

And it's baby-badger-time-of-year. They give birth in March and April.

With the help of our trusty friend Craig, and his assistants, RandomTruth and I spent a few days at the ranch last month setting cams at carnivore dens.

At this promising den I set a Sony s600 for stills, and a Bushnell Trophy for videos of playful badger babies.

Regrettably, the Trophy can't be set for night time only, so there's been a flurry of false triggers in the heat of the day.

Craig, our good man in Chimineas has been cleaning the lenses and checking the memory cards.

Here's his most recent message.

"It seems that the badger shots decreased quite a lot over the course of the month.  I'm hoping it's because she had youngsters. 

As the badger usage decreased, Heermann's kangaroo rat visitation increased.  There are many shots of them bouncing around the entrance to the den. 

When I reset the camera, I saw that there was a rodent hole just above the badger den.  It seems unwise for a fossorial small mammal to have a den next to a badger den, but kangaroo rats were never known for their smarts.  

Raccoons visited the den and sniffed around a few times over the course of the set.  I still think that the badger is using this den."  

Knock on wood, my friends.

Let us hope the blessed event has transpired and that mom is blissfully nursing her litter.

Two badgers

American badgers lead a solitary life, which means that most of the time they're loners.

Males and females consort briefly in the summer and early fall, and birth takes place in March and April.

The "mother family" is the most enduring social unit, but the family breaks up in the fall when the young strike out on their own.

This photo of two badgers was taken at the Chimineas Ranch on March 23.

Its hard to say what's going on.

We may be witnessing hanky-panky between consenting adults or an innocent game of "Gotcha" between siblings of last year's litter.

But the photo makes one point clear: one can learn a lot from camera trapping.

This single photo tells us that friendly social interactions take place outside of the seasonal periods of mating and family life.  

There's still a lot to learn about the ecology of Striped-face.

Striped-Face in a Bluffing Mood

Is this badger's body language telling you anything?

If you think he looks like any other badger, kinda cute and snuggly, look at the next picture.

This is the usual appearance of Striped-face when he encounters a camera trap on the trail.

The animal is composed and attentive, and you might even say he looks curious.

That's how the working badger usually looks when snapped by a camera trap.

What about the badger in the first image -- the one stiffly braced on spread legs and looking as round as a cream puff?

If you still think he looks cute and snuggly I hope you never meet this fellow.

Note that his back is up, and he seems to have raised the hair on the far-side of his body.

That grizzled badger hair so famous for shaving brushes also outlines the creature's contour and shows off its bloated appearance rather nicely.

This is the "broadside display" of a bluffing badger. It's a defensive threat that shows off the animal's size to best advantage.

For badgers it's an unusual reaction to a camera trap.

Old Striped-face may be a tough customer, but he's a rambler who strays far from his burrows, and sometimes he stumbles into hungry predators larger than himself (not to mention the occasional scary camera trap).

That's when bluffing is a good defense.


Reference

Wemmer, C. and Wilson, D.E.  1983. Structure and function of hair crests and capes in African carnivora.  In Behavior and Ecology of Mammals, edited by J.F. Eisenberg and D. Kleiman, American Society of Mammalogists, Special Publication Number 7:239-264.

Striped Face, the cunning Badger

"The badger was in his hole. Stooping over, the young man shouted: "Oh, cunning striped face!  Oh, generous animal!  I wish to speak with you."

"What do you want?" said the badger, poking his head out of the hole.

"I want to find the sun's home," replied Scarface. "I want to speak with him."

"I do not know where he lives," replied the badger. "I never travel very far. Over there in the timber is the wolverine. He is always traveling around, and is of much knowledge. Maybe he can tell you."

Striped Face had a cameo role In Blackfoot Indian legend.

On the Chiminea Ranch he also plays bit parts.

He comes and goes, and rarely hangs around for long.

This badger didn't shrink from climbing a steep hill where a fermenting can of cat food beckoned.

The bait was stuffed into a cleft in the outcrop

Striped face visited the set on five occasions and left 13 images.

On his first visit he circled the rock.

It took one circuit and he discovered that the scent came from above.

Apparently he couldn't reach it.

Those stubby legs weren't equal to the task; so he went away.

A couple nights later Striped face came back.

In Blackfoot legend only the wolverine knew that the trail to the Big Water led to the sun.

This badger also seemed to know the sun's home.

Indeed, he seems to have paused a moment to watch it fading beyond the Big Water.

Reference

George Bird Grinnell, 1962. Blackfoot Lodge Tales, The Story of a Prairie People. University of Nebraska Press. [The excerpt comes from the story "Scarface, Origin of the Medicine Lodge"].

Badger Head Gulch

In a few days we'll look at the comings and goings in Badger Head Gulch, but first some background.

To begin with, there is no Badger Head Gulch.

We named it for poor Yorick, above, who met his untimely demise here last spring.

The gulch is actually the headwaters of Saltos Canyon, which at this point is just a steep-walled erosion gully of compacted sand, sandstone and shale rubble.

Most of the year it's a dry dusty gash in the Caliente Range with a narrow game trail tracing it length through occasional thickets of saltbush, mulefat, and alkali goldenbush.

In the winter it drains a brown slurry of outwash into the much larger Saltos Canyon.

There are many places like it on the ranch, and we explored it on August 10th for camera trapping.

We started at the jeep track (lower left) and ended at the fork "set 392" (upper right).

The banks were riddled with burrows of all sizes ---  a good sign -- and as we ascended the gulch we noticed that the steepening walls were closing in on us.

Not a place to find yourself in a flash flood.

Right off we encountered mementos mori --

a tarantula being eaten by Lilliputians

a raven who will never again quork nevermore

a half-finished meal of McRattlesnake

and the severed and sun-cured head of Yorick -- the brain case and its nutritious contents munched away.

As the walls of the gulch boxed us in I realized this was the perfect place for predatory ambuscade.

A puma could leap down from the rim in one or two bounds and a coyote could surprise prey on a bend in the trail.

And while a fleeing jackrabbit might be able to scale the walls of that gulch, it would be a risky move for a black-tailed deer fleeing a puma.

The soil was too loose . . . better to run like hell down the arroyo, if the cat didn't get you first.

It was late afternoon when our hot and weary team arrived at a fork in the gulch -- a natural funnel and a good place for the camera.

There we made set 392.

Badgers and gangrenous legs

He's not looking for a salted leg, but he wouldn't pass it up if  he found one.

Would Badger run off with the salted gangrenous leg of a Texas Ranger?

You betcha.

Robert Duvall as Augustus McCrae.

Recall that it was an American badger that absconded with Gus McCrae's amputated leg as Woodrow Call hauled the old Ranger's salted corpse back to Lonesome Dove.

Not a wolf or coyote.

I believe it was somewhere in Wyoming -- excellent badger country.

Burial in Texas was Gus's last wish, but it's a bumpy ride when you and your leg are lashed to a travois, even on the flat plains.

So the badger got a meal, and fate forever separated Gus's corpse from one good walking leg. 

One digging dude

He came in the darkness of night -- 11:20 to be exact.

Quickly cased the scene, including the camera,

and then went to work.

Finally he came up for air.

Apparently the job was done -- completed in 9 minutes.

He cleaned up and hit the trail.

Whether he carried off the festering can of cat food we do not know.

It was gone, just like the batteries that powered the camera that took these pictures.

  

Badger in the mist

There was nothing new to show from the last camera trapping event at Chimineas.

Just a badger in the mist, though the mist was in the camera. (It looks like a youngster from last year's crop).

A kangaroo rat was busy in most of the frames.

And a curious steer showed up a few days before we collected the two cameras.

We're expecting some next species later this month because we made 12 sets in new and underrepresented habitats.

Walking hay bale

Craig sent a photo the other day, and it was good news.

It looks like a hay bale after a long hard winter, but it wasn't.

It was a bodacious badger and a new species for our camera trap survey of the carnivores of Chimineas.

It revealed a bit more of itself in one other photo, but not much.

We hope to see more of Br'er Badger and its kin in the coming months.

Brawl at the badger dig

Set 305: a badger dig in the grassland.

There are several possibilities of course, but when you set a cam at a badger dig you are hoping for a badger.

Badger diggings are common in grassland at Chimineas, because California ground squirrels are abundant.

Set 305 was a ground squirrel burrow that seemed to have been enlarged by a badger.

Craig notes that big clods of dirt indicate that the digger is a badger, rather than a ground squirrel, whose excavation equipment is much smaller.

So we staked a camera next to the burrow, and knowing that diurnal ground squirrels could fill a card in a few days, we set it for night pictures only.

As we viewed the pictures last week, it was apparent that mice outnumbered badgers.

In fact there were no badgers, and less than one out of 3 pictures had an animal in it.

California pocket mice (Chaetodipus californicus) were the most common visitors, and had no doubt caused the false triggers.

Most of the pictures were presumably of one mouse puttering around the burrow tailings and entrance.

One expects small mice to live in small burrows, so my assumption is that this one lived nearby and was foraging for seeds in the exposed soil of the ground squirrel nest.

But it could have had a sub-burrow somewhere within the ground squirrel tunnel.

A few frames later revealed that an intruder had brazenly entered the resident's territory.

For its cheekiness it was paying the price.

The brawlers were locked in mortal combat.

They broke apart and faced off.

At that point the resident retreated to the burrow, and it seemed to be over.

But a few moments later they were at it again, this time boxing.

In the final frame the apparent winner watched the vanquished preparing to retreat into the forest of grass.

The brawl had lasted a little more than a minute.

Victory is sweet.

Wussified Montanans play it safe

The lovable but not huggable American badger. 

Photo courtesy of Chuck Gackstetter.

The police in Billings blasted a badger that was hiding under a loading dock in a shopping center.

The game commission and animal control agents --those who normally solve such problems and usually by non-lethal means, didn't want to be bothered.

So Barney and his fellow police took care of this public menace with buckshot. 

I suspect the animal found itself in the wrong place, took cover, and was waiting to make tracks.

But this is Montana. Out West.

Where, as folksinger U. Utah Philips used to say, "the states are square, the men and are men, and the sheep are all worried".

Well, that's how it used to be. They say the demographics of the west are changing.

What the hell happened to the Montanans who weren't afraid of badgers?

My friend Brian Miller with whom I had to commiserate, had this to say:

"What a bunch of wimps.

When I started school at Wyoming, a badger fell into a 8 foot by 3 foot window well of a University building. The window well was about 5 feet deep.

They called Hank Harlow and me to come and catch it.

We dropped down into the well, put a #10 corn scoop in front of our feet for protection, caught the badger with a rabid dog noose and released it onto the prairie."

That reminds me of the time my childhood friend Tom Briggs found a sleeping badger.

We were on a field trip to Tesla Road near the town of Livermore, California.

Back in the late 50s it was good badger country, all grassland and valley oaks.  

Not heeding the adage about sleeping dogs, Tom took off his belt and slipped it over the animal's head.

The badger woke up in a foul mood and started to snap and twirl like a whirling Dervish.

Maybe leading it back to the truck to show his friends wasn't such a good idea.

Tom decided to let it go.

The snarling badger took off and Tom went home without his belt.

Which brings me back to the law-and-order cops of Billings.

I think they could have done better.

A fire extinguisher or bear spray would have sent that scary badger packing.

Or they could have zapped it with their taser, thrown it in the trunk and headed for the prairie with flashing lights and wailing siren.

Now that's the kind of story I'd prefer to read about cops and badgers in Big Sky Country.


[Thanks again to the Outdoor Pressroom for posting goofy news and other good outdoors stuff, and to Chuck Gackstetter who seems to have the camera trapping record for great badger pictures.]