RELEASING BADGERS
ESBPS have become specialists in the art of releasing young badgers to the wild, mainly due to the expertise and supreme effort put in by our Senior Wildlife Officer Warwick Reynolds. When we release rehabilitated adult badgers to the wild, it is simply a case of returning them as close as is safe to where they were found but with young badgers it is a very different story.
CARING FOR BADGERS
Simon Cowell’s Wildlife Aid Hospital near Leatherhead has excellent care facilities for a variety of wildlife, including badgers, and we have taken many badgers there. Young badgers are brought to the centre every Spring for rehabilitation. Some cubs have strayed from their setts and all efforts to return them have failed, others are orphans – their mothers killed in road accidents. Later in the year, when these badgers are more mature, they cannot return to their original setts. Someone has to find a suitable site, build an artificial sett and release the badgers as a social group in a careful and controlled way. We cannot just let inexperienced badgers go. Locally established badgers are highly territorial and would attack randomly released badgers, that are learning to fend for themselves. Some of our releases feature in Simon Cowell’s television series Animal Planet on the Discovery channel.