Many thanks to everyone who participated in this years Badger Census at Wytham Woods. With over 50 setts to watch we needed at least 150 volunteers each evening, and for the first time ever we achieved this target. Even though the weather was unseasonably cool and very wet on the Tuesday night we were thrilled by everyone's enthusiasm to learn more about badgers and participate in our research.

The efforts of the Earthwatch Institute, The Oxford Times, The Oxford Mail, Radio Oxford and the Oxford Nature Conservation Forum for assisting with publicising the event were also much appreciated.

Also special thanks to Nigel Fisher, Graeme McLaren, Kat Service, Inigo Montes, Yayoi Kaneko, Judith Lloyd, Rebecca Twell, James Bunyan, Kerry Kilshaw, Steve Hope, Chris Bolton and Kate Sillars for acting as guides on all three evenings, and to Martin Speight for organisation student participation.

Despite poor weather, and no badgers being seen at all at 10 active setts on any evening, 97 adults and 19 cubs were observed.

Typically, our work with Earthwatch volunteer teams calibrating the badger watching suggests only 2/3rd of badgers present in a sett are generally seen, so these numbers are very encouraging.

Badgers eat mostly earthworms when they can, and this is one of the first types of food mum will introduce cubs to on their first foraging trips with her. With wet weather, worms are easily found, but spring droughts, like we had in 2002 and 2003, can be very bad news for the cubs because their earthworm-food ends up in short supply, often resulting in heavy cub mortality.

So, after a couple of bad years, the wet spring was just what the badger population needed (even if it was miserable for the watchers!).
Unfortunately for those watching at the setts, because the badgers were well fed, they could afford to get up quite late on an evening and go off quite quickly to reliably find food, but many groups still saw lots of activity. The maximum number of badgers seen at any one sett was 9 adults and 3 cubs.

We have been performing the annual badger census in Wytham since 1976, and the general trend has certainly been for badger numbers to increase over that period. We hypothesise this is as a result of shorter, wetter, milder winters helping badgers survive between years better and also allowing the pregnant females to keep up their winter fat reserves and produce more cubs the following spring as a result.

Dry springs could cancel out the benefits of easier winters, however, if this is trend that broadly continues with climate change, so it is especially important to monitor the badger population over the coming years to see how they fare.

Thanks to All
Dr. Chris Newman & Dr. Christina Buesching