Watching Badgers

I picked up Darren Christie early yesterday evening and we went “somewhere”, had a bit of a walk and then distributed a few peanuts in some strategically chosen spots, retreated up a hill, and then, post a vicious midgie assault, retreated a little bit further up the hill where the breeze was blowing – and waited.
We didn’t have to wait for to long for the first sighting of our quarry – a small black and white face appeared out of a hole, sniffed around for a second or two and then disappeared again. Too quick to get any pictures.
So we waited some more and, just as the daylight was starting to fade, the wind dropped and a seething horde of midgies appeared out of the little glen below us and done us over good and proper – to such an extent that we had to abandon our positions and walk about quickly, hiding our heads in hoods and under fleeces and generally not paying too much attention to what, if anything was going on below.
What was going on was that Brock decided that this was a good opportunity to have another look out. Luckily, the breeze returned and the midgies disappeared, so Darren managed to get quite a good piece of short video of our little badger nervously sniffing the air and deciding whether or not to come out of the hole. In the end he (or she?) decided not to. I suspect our scent was on the wind.
It was pretty dark by this time, so we weren’t going to see any more without night vision equipment, so we left badger to the peanuts.
I didn’t get any badger pics at all – hopefully, Darren will be blogging something about this trip here http://www.whitespider1066.com/ - I suspect most readers will recognise this blog. But there’s a couple of pics taken before the light went. My photography skills and equipment really aren’t up to this kind of challenge. I’ll leave that to Darren.
We saw a couple of foraging hedgehogs too…
I’m not saying where the “somewhere” is by the way. Some people like to do bad things to badgers.