Badger's Run

[Bruce Williams]

Hi folks,

They say that every picture tells a story....

The barbed wire in the photo is no more than a foot from the ground and is on the route of a well used badger's run. There's a cleverly concealed badger's set within sight of the fence and at least one more set within a fifteen minute casual stroll. Badgers are nocturnal animals and as I only visit the park during daylight hours (walking my dog), sadly I have never seen the owner of these particular hairs.

Bruce

[Mike B in OKlahoma]

What a cool find! Good eyes there.

If you look around some of the nature photography websites (I think it was in naturescapes.net, but might have been photomigrations.com) someone posted a couple of articles about setting up "trap" cameras for unattended night photography of critters like your badger. Might be worth investigating doing here.

[Ken Ramos]

You know this really displays the exemplary properties of barbed wire! It would be neat to set up a rig, as Mike mentioned, so as to capture these mean little critters on their nightly runs.

[beetleman]

Very different subject matter Bruce...I like the way the wire captured two different colors of hair

[cactuspic]

With that much fur on two separate barbs, it is amazing that fur is all you see. Good shot Bruce.

Irwin

[Bruce Williams]

Thanks for your comments guys. I have since gone back and collected those hairs for examination under the microscope.

Bruce

[Bruce Williams]

Hi again,

Picking up on Doug's point about the hair colour, I thought I'd post this link to a photo of the European badger to aid speculation about where (on the badger) the hair might come from. The white hair is on the middle barb (you can just make out a third barb with coloured hair on the far left of the pic.

My guess would be head (white) and shoulders (mixed).

Will be posting microscope pic of hairs shortly.

Bruce