Living with Badgers Guide
How to live in harmony with badgers
How do I know if a badger has visited my garden?
What are the benefits of having badger visitors?
Why is a badger visiting my garden?
Download Living with Badgers: Your ultimate guide to Badgers in Gardens
Help, a badger is digging up my lawn!
How to live in harmony with badgers
Badgers are iconic mammals, and we are lucky to have them around in this country. Small changes in perspective and simple actions go a long way towards sustainable and friendly human-badger co-existence.
Badger Trust’s ‘Living with Badgers’ guide is for anyone interested in badger-human co-existence, including those of us who may currently be experiencing unwelcomed encounters with badgers.
Badgers and gardens
If you can, creating safe areas for displaced wildlife helps to keep the species and their ecosystems healthy. So if you have a sett in your garden, the easiest thing to do is be patient and enjoy watching these key ecosystem engineers at work. Remember that badgers and their setts are protected, and disturbing them is illegal.
Badger Trust, the leading voice for badgers in England and Wales, always encourages creating more space for wildlife and healthy ecosystems. So if you have badgers in your garden, consider yourself lucky to have such an interesting species to share your outside space. After all, when badgers visit your garden, it’s a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
And if you still need convincing, perhaps put up a wildlife camera so that you can watch badgers doing their natural behaviour, such as foraging for food and playing with one another – it can be fascinating! Their playful family dynamics and unassuming amble are sure to help endear you to badgers, and before long, badgers will hold a special place in your heart.
How do I know if a badger has visited my garden?
With their incredible sense of smell, badgers find food where they can.
Often unseen and unheard, they wander quietly into gardens at night, feeding on the earthworms, grubs, snails and slugs they find in lawns and borders.
They usually leave small visual signs – a snuffle hole or pieces of scratched turf – as visible evidence of their nighttime visit.
What are the benefits of having badger visitors?
Badger activity in your garden may have added benefits.
Badgers are a central part of the ecosystem and have a key role in dispersing seeds through their dung. Like many animals that eat fruit, their faeces help plant the seeds further from the host plant and provide nutrients for the seeds to grow.
The digging behaviours of badgers also help to create micro-habitats for pollinating insects, including bumble bees.
Why is a badger visiting my garden?
Living alongside these native mammals can be tricky if you’re not keen on seasonal visitors. Still, it's worth bearing in mind that badgers are wild animals with a strong connection to their territories and special areas, which might be the reason that they are visiting you. If your garden falls in the area that they have traditionally used for foraging, it’s likely that badgers will return even if they have been previously displaced. It might even be that badgers were there long before the human residents!
Badgers may also visit gardens more frequently during times of drought or heavy frost — conditions which make foraging harder for badgers. In these instances, flower beds and lawns can offer an easier substrate to dig for insects and larvae.
Help, a badger is digging up my lawn!
Many people enjoy having badgers visit their gardens. But as wild animals who don’t recognise things like ‘gardens’ or understand fences or boundaries, they can present challenges to homeowners. In dry or frosty conditions for example, when natural food is hard to come by, badgers can damage flower beds and lawns in desperate search of food.
As a rightly protected and wild animal, you are limited in what you can do, but usually, it is possible to reduce garden damage without harming badgers.
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Often damage is seasonal, and you may see periods of greater activity in the late autumn (as badgers prepare for the winter) and spring (when badgers have cubs). If you can be patient, the badgers will often become less active at different times of the year.
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If you are having issues with badgers digging up your lawn, controlling the food source can be the first deterrent if you are unhappy about your nighttime visitors. A badger’s primary food is earthworms, which they will suck from the surface like spaghetti, so they are unlikely to cause any damage. However, if they are digging into the lawn, they are probably looking for insect larvae beneath the roots of the grass, especially from Cockchafer beetle (May bug) and Leather Jacket (Cranefly).
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The season for grubs is relatively short-lived, and raked and well-drained lawns will help reduce the burden. You can also try removing weeds, scarifying dead moss, improving drainage or applying nematodes to help stop larvae from taking up residence in your lawn, where they will damage the grass root structure before the badgers ever snuffle them out.
How to co-exist with badger visitors to my garden
Badgers are strong, determined animals and excellent diggers. Badgers will always use the same tracks for generations. When areas are constantly fragmented by new development, foraging ranges become restricted, causing them to find alternate routes to access their familiar territory.
If a badger is breaking fencing, you may want to consider installing a badger gate, or leaving a gap, so they can pass through your garden without damaging the fence. For these to be effective, they should be positioned at a badger trail, i.e. the route the badger uses. This is the most effective way to co-exist with badgers.
Badger deterrents
When considering deterring badgers (and perhaps any wild animal) from a garden, remember that wild animals are just that – wild. They have no conception of gardens, fences, or where humans would rather they did or didn’t go. The badger is simply exploring the area that may have been their home long before the person arrived to share it with them.
Many people are not lucky enough to see a live badger, so having a badger visit a property or garden could be considered quite a special thing. Considering the matter from this perspective can be useful when dealing with any inconvenience or damage they may cause.
Badgers can be discouraged or prevented from entering gardens by solid, effective fencing, locked gates and the use of ultrasonic deterrent devices (not always 100 per cent effective, can be expensive and may impact other animals in the vicinity).
A radio left on all night in a garden – at a level which doesn’t offend neighbours – has been reported as successfully discouraging badgers from entering. However, where practical, electric fences are the most effective humane deterrents. There are no legal proven chemical deterrents for badgers.
Recurring attempts by badgers to enter gardens are sometimes only resolved when a badger-proof mesh is trenched to a depth of around one metre to prevent them from digging under fences.
Deploying any badger deterrent means that badgers then start to lose out on known territory to the point where their wider existence in the area could be threatened due to human activity. Badgers are determined and strong animals and will try to use known badger paths and access existing areas as part of their normal behaviour. The ideal solution is that, where possible, the human in the equation looks at altering their behaviour or approach to the situation to learn to co-exist with the animal.
Finally, remember that badgers and their setts are protected by law, and any interference with them could be a criminal offence. If you have a persistent issue with badgers that you need advice about, please contact your local badger group in the first instance. You can also contact us here at Badger Trust and seek advice from Natural England, which is responsible for licensing any activities relating to badger interventions.
But what about my local hedgehogs?
It is a myth that badgers are Britain's leading cause of hedgehog decline. These two species have lived together for hundreds of thousands of years. Hedgehog numbers only recently started to fall, and the sudden and steep rate of hedgehog decline cannot be attributed to predation from badgers.
Published data supports the view of a bigger, more complex picture of hedgehog decline. For example, the number of hedgehog sightings recorded in the State of Britain's Hedgehogs survey fell dramatically between 2004 and 2015, showing that the population decline was sudden and sharp, a trend unlikely to be caused only by predation. In addition, rates of hedgehog decline were the same in areas where badgers do not live.
Research has shown many factors contribute to hedgehog decline, and all of these factors are anthropogenic (human-induced). Learn more about Badgers and Hedgehogs: Separating fact from fiction in British native wildlife
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