The Badger 4 7
often as not the new house is abandoned before completed, and the subsequent
labours of the family are devoted to repairing, enlarging, and making new front
and back doors to the old place.’
About the month of March Badgers often have a regular spring cleaning.
All the old winter bedding is thrown out, and the animals themselves repair to
another of the chambers where the female brings forth her young ones. I have
recently seen (April 1903) as much as three or four cartloads of rubbish ejected
from an earth in west Sussex, and the keeper told me that he has seen the
Badgers at this season carrying fresh litter to form new beds, and on this point
I must again quote S ir A. Pease, who gives a charming description of the
method employed. ‘ The Badger will come out,’ he says, ‘ take a look round, and
sit awhile close to the mouth of the hole. He will then shuffle about and get
further from the hole. You will watch him descend into some bracken-covered
hollow, and will see nothing more of him for a while. Then you will hear him
gently pushing and shoving and grunting, and know that he is very busy over
something. He will reappear bumping along backwards a heap of bracken and of
grass or old straw, left from a pheasant feed, under his belly and encircled by
his arms and fore-feet. He will continue this most undignified and curious mode
of retrogression to the earth, and will disappear, tail first, down his hole, still
hugging and tugging at his burden.’ 1
After the female Badger has brought forth her young ones, and they are of
some size, the lying-in chamber is said to be thoroughly scoured out, but most
writers are agreed that fresh bedding is not taken in until June, July, or August,
and certainly the work of keeping the home in good order is continued much
later in the year, even as late as November.
The length and variability of the gestation of the Badger have given rise at
different times to much discussion amongst naturalists, and now a very generally
accepted theory is that when the period of pregnancy has lasted (as sometimes
happens in the case of animals in confinement) as long as twelve or even fifteen
months,2 the impregnated ovum undergoes a long period of very slow growth
1 I have seen the female Badger now in the Zoological Gardens (1903) going through exactly the same manoeuvres.
She had brought a great quantity of straw out of the retreat and, for want of fresh litter, was collecting it under her belly to
take it back again.
2 There is, too, more than one undoubted instance of a female Badger producing young after fifteen months, during
which she could have had no visits from another of her own species. In 1891 a female Badger was imported from Spain
and lived in complete confinement for fifteen months, and then gave birth to one young one, which she reared and lost.
Mr. Freeland Young (Field, September 17, 1864) records a similar instance of a fifteen months’ gestation.