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<\/a><\/p>\nI photographed this badger in June of last year near the Montana\/Idaho border.\u00a0 Just look at that muscleman chest and those incredibly powerful “forearms” designed for digging. Their digging skills are legendary. My Audubon Field Guide To Mammals says that badgers are such formidable diggers that if someone tries to dig one out of its burrow they can “outpace a man with a shovel, showering dirt in the face of its attacker”.<\/p>\n
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This is the business end of those powerful digging front legs – long, semi-curved claws that can dig quickly\u00a0in hard packed soil.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A few days ago\u00a0time-lapse photography by a Utah conservation biologist was released that documents a badger burying a young cow. Badgers are known to bury food but have never been documented burying anything larger than themselves. The clip is definitely worth watching and I’d recommend it be seen\u00a0full screen. Here’s a link to the time-lapse photos on National Geographic – “Badger Buries Entire Cow Carcass<\/a>“.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Richardson’s Ground Squirrel (“gopher”)<\/em><\/p>\n All this brought back\u00a0one of my memories of growing up on the Montana farm but telling the story requires a confession on my part. As kids my cousin Ken Dudley and I used to shoot “gophers” (Richardson’s Ground Squirrels). Gophers raise havoc on grain farms in the spring\u00a0by eating the new wheat and barley shoots to the point that entire fields can be laid bare. And their holes are hard on farm equipment. I’ve shot many thousands of gophers in my day – it was part of growing up in rural Montana and still is. I’m not defending the practice – it is what it is.<\/p>\n The next morning Ken and I occasionally noticed that a particular gopher we’d shot was gone – all that remained was a small area of freshly churned earth where the gopher had been.\u00a0 Some missing gophers of course would be scavenged by predators (raptors, badgers etc) but what would explain the churned earth where some of the gophers had been? Back then we never figured it out.<\/p>\n Ken stayed on the farm after I left for Utah to become a teacher and many decades later I received an excited phone call from him – he’d solved the mystery. One late evening he’d watched as Burying Beetles <\/a>were in the process of burying one of the gophers he’d shot. The\u00a0next morning the gopher was gone, leaving behind only freshly churned earth. Both of us were excited to finally know the answer to the long-standing mystery.<\/p>\n These days Burying Beetles in many areas are threatened or endangered and they have completely disappeared\u00a0from large parts of\u00a0their original range.<\/p>\n Anyway, this “new” badger behavior reminded me of those beetles so I decided to\u00a0share the story.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An American Badger here in Utah buried an entire cow carcass and they have it on “video” – (really time lapse photography, speeded up). It’s only a calf but it’s still hugely impressive and the behavior was previously unknown. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n