Is there such a thing as an urban badger? Seen and know about urban foxes. But outside our house just now was a young badger! Hiding from the shooters in Somerset or Wales? But we're in Manchester..... Thinking if it could get through the cat flap now....
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Well don't encourage it. Wisdom is that badgers are shy and peaceful chaps, but I'm pretty sure one has had a couple of chickens here, so it might have a go at your cat!
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Encourage it? It was walking down the street! And yes we have concern about the cat. Really surprised to see a badger here to be honest.
If I get a rifle or print one can I legally shoot it :-)
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No. Badgers have been tooled up for ages on Anglesey....if it's one of ours on holiday in your neck of the woods...it'll shoot back.
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:-) I'll sneak up on it....
It walked down the pavement opposite ours when we were out front. We then thought no it can't be a badger so maybe a fox or cat. And then it came back the way it went and it's definitely a badger.
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Bear in mind it's Saturday night in Manchester.
It's probably just Rattle in a black and white striped T-shirt on his hands and knees crawling back from the pub. If it looks nervous or anxious about everything then it's definitely him...
;-)
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Badgers can be vicious and can give you a nasty bite or raking with the claws, never mind a serious and frequently fatal duffing for the cat.
Although typically they won't bother anything unless it bothers them or their young since they are quite private creatures.
So if all your cat does is pop out for the occasional sneak about and crap in next doors strawberry patch then I wouldn't worry. If, on the other hand, it goes out hunting and stalking then it may well get itself into trouble.
Last edited by: VxFan on Tue 3 Dec 13 at 12:59
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.....Although I've never heard of urban badgers, I must admit.
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There are badgers living in our local churchyard - 500 meters from our house. As a result , I cannot grow strawberries as they love them, wait for them to ripen and eat them.
Place them on a raised bed 1 meter above the ground...? They climb up.
We have a badger path through our garden - they are creatures of habit - which goes through our vegetable garden , through the box hedge, round the bird table to eat scraps and out through our gate... On the way they crap in a nice soft piece of earth.
Dug up and ate 2 wasps nests in the garden this year. Left the hives alone - so far.
We are semi urban but certainly not rural...but the badgers are country bumpkins I am afraid. Caught one in my neighbour's fox trap by mistake and released it - it was not best pleased...
Last edited by: madf on Sun 10 Nov 13 at 06:14
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I've seen a set just outside town, and nearly run a badger over in the drive to the former Daventry Transmitting Station. Both locations being in the country, but not by much.
A lot of folk though never see wildlife because they don't how to look.
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>>nearly run a badger over
You'll be lucky, unless you're in a great big truck. Hitting one's like hitting a bag of cement and causes a similar amount of damage - so I'm told.
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I suspect there may be a few "shell shocked" and confused badgers about at the moment due to fireworks.
Our youngest saw a badger outside our house on Friday night about ten-ish. The nearest likely place a badger belongs near here is the other end of the park near the cricket club.
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>> >>nearly run a badger over
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>> You'll be lucky, unless you're in a great big truck. Hitting one's like hitting a
>> bag of cement and causes a similar amount of damage - so I'm told.
>>
I ran one over just south of Hull. Loud thud when I hit it, only had a couple of secs after I saw it to do anything managed to hit the brakes. You really feel the impact through the wheel. Took out the front bumper, radiator, a/c pipes plus other bits and bobs. Thought they were going to write it off, bill ran into 4 figures.
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>> You'll be lucky, unless you're in a great big truck. Hitting one's like hitting a
>> bag of cement and causes a similar amount of damage - so I'm told.
>>
I hit a young one in the Mondeo a few years ago. Luckily it was small enough to clear the bodywork but the thump through the steering was like dropping down a large pothole. They are solid things.
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>> Hitting one's like hitting a bag of cement and causes a similar amount of damage - so I'm told.
I have hit one, at about 50, and I can confirm that.
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>> I've seen a set just outside town, and nearly run a badger over in the
>> drive to the former Daventry Transmitting Station. Both locations being in the country, but not
>> by much.
Last time I looked the Daventry transmitting station was still there on Borough Hill. Admittedly only a single guyed mast now rather than the old lattice towers. Orginally used for experiments in digital radio but it now part of the network and fills a gap in coverage round here.
Plenty of Badgers in the surrounding area - roadkill evidence is plentiful on A5 and A45. Badby woods were a good watching spot twenty or so years ago. One of the attractions of the, now sadly closed, Youth Hostel in Badby was the chance of seeing brock.
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Last time I looked the Daventry transmitting station was still there on Borough Hill. Admittedly only a single guyed mast now rather than the old lattice towers. Orginally used for experiments in digital radio but it now part of the network and fills a gap in coverage round here
I was forgetting about DAB, I was there when it was a real transmitting station, owned by the BBC and a major shortwave site. (Site now owned by Arqiva).
In its hayday the lattice towers supported directional curtain aerial arrays that beamed signals to the four corners of the globe. Absolutely horrendous effective radiated power and it wasn't unknown for a gas cooker in a house in Daventry to start talking.
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>> I was forgetting about DAB, I was there when it was a real transmitting station,
>> owned by the BBC and a major shortwave site. (Site now owned by Arqiva).
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>> In its hayday the lattice towers supported directional curtain aerial arrays that beamed signals to
>> the four corners of the globe. Absolutely horrendous effective radiated power and it wasn't unknown
>> for a gas cooker in a house in Daventry to start talking.
When we moved here in 1990 the original masts were still on Borough Hill and lit at night. Demolished in 91/2 IIRC. The other set of lights locally marked out Rugby Radio, the VLF transmitters for submarine etc communications. They're now gone too.
Rugby Radio was landmark nearly all my life. As children we passed it en route from Leeds to my Grandmother in Blandford Forum and later on any other trip south. Later, living in north London then Watford they were markers for an ninety mins from home. Once we settled in Northants they were the last waypoint; home in 20 mins.
It was rabbits rather than badgers that threatened their demolition - nibbling the fuses for the explosive charges.
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The Daventry site was quite a sad place to be.
Real signs of how significant it used to be, and how it really wasn't any more.
Including a very intimidating nuclear shelter and huge cellars.
Last edited by: No FM2R on Sun 10 Nov 13 at 21:14
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Its also where they, by accident, discovered radar.
Its also where Audi discovered that their new fangled electronic injection wasn't EMF proof. Mostly on the M1.
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>> Its also where they, by accident, discovered radar.
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Not really an accident Zero they were testing a theory. The experiments that proved an aircraft could be detected by it's distorting radio waves took place in a hollow about two miles from where I sit and type now.
See the radar memorial on the Bugbrooke to Litchborough Road just off the A5:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=826tJ2BwR4I
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They were testing a theory that they could destroy a plane by radio waves. And in doing so found out they could detect one.
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No such thing as an urbane badger. Uncouth, rude and lacking sophistication every one.
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>> No such thing as an urbane badger. Uncouth, rude and lacking sophistication every one.
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But when their infants were fractious and quite beyond
control, they would quiet them by telling how, if they didn't hush
them and not fret them, the terrible grey Badger would up and get
them. This was a base libel on Badger, who, though he cared little
about Society, was rather fond of children; but it never failed to
have its full effect.
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I spotted one in my garden a couple of months back and there are signs of lawn damage and attempted setts. A neighbour has often seen a family of them and said one member used to have a regular 10.30 pm stroll along our road. We are in a heavily built-up area.
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“Badger hates Society, and invitations, and dinner, and all that sort of thing.”
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Badgers are fair game here in Sweden. We shoot them, trap them, hunt them with dogs, and send dogs down the setts. They are seen for what they are, a pest that destroys many other species thereby limiting the diversity in the countryside.
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They are really brave the Swedes,problaby that is why they where neutral in WW2.Leave these Badgers alone.
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Stewed badger with mashed Swede.. yum.
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>> They are really brave the Swedes,problaby that is why they where neutral in WW2.Leave these
>> Badgers alone.
you don't get badgers in Holland. Any hole in the ground deeper than 6 inches floods, they would all die.
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>> They are really brave the Swedes,problaby that is why they where neutral in WW2.Leave these
>> Badgers alone.
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They were sort of neutral in the war, apart from letting the Nazis pass through to invade Norway, and providing raw materials to the Germans.
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>> >>
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>> They were sort of neutral in the war, apart from letting the Nazis pass through
>> to invade Norway, and providing raw materials to the Germans.
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I think they started off neutral in a sort of pro-German way, and gradually changed to end up sort of pro-Allies by the end. They were also quite keen on eugenics, surprisingly not ending it until 1975.
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>> I think they started off neutral in a sort of pro-German way, and gradually changed
>> to end up sort of pro-Allies by the end.
They were in a sort of pro-"who ever is winning" way. They even let the Germans use their railways to invade Norway.
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Sweden had a choice:
Assist the Germans and keep your Government.
Don't assist, get invaded. You would lose any war (quickly) and lose your Government...and have Germans running you.
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>> Sweden had a choice:
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>> Assist the Germans and keep your Government.
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>> Don't assist, get invaded. You would lose any war (quickly) and lose your Government...and have
>> Germans running you.
If everybody had made that choice then the Germans would by now be running the whole world.
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>> If everybody had made that choice then the Germans would by now be running the
>> whole world.
Worse than that, the French would be running the world c/o napoleon.
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Hang on, wouldn't the Romans have conquered the entire known world. Oh hang on...
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>> If everybody had made that choice then the Germans would by now be running the
>> whole world.
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A question of scale - size of population and army....
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We could have signed a peace treaty with Hitler.
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>> We could have signed a peace treaty with Hitler.
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And then waved it about claiming it was peace for our time.
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>> We could have signed a peace treaty with Hitler.
And came quite close to it. There were strong voices, including the King, supporting Lord Halifax rather than Churchill after Chamberlain's fall. Halifax's own reticence about being PM in the Lords derailed the bid.
Halifax would almost certainly have sued for peace.
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This forum is great -moving from me reporting a sighting of a badger in Manchester to talking about peace treaties with Hitler. - How many steps did that take? Not many... seems to be badger, shooting badgers in Sweden, Sweden's 'neutrality' in WWII and then onto this.
:-) Carry on.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Tue 12 Nov 13 at 15:53
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>> This forum is great -moving from me reporting a sighting of a badger in Manchester
>> to talking about peace treaties with Hitler. - How many steps did that take? Not
>> many... seems to be badger, shooting badgers in Sweden, Sweden's 'neutrality' in WWII and then
>> onto this.
>>
>> :-) Carry on.
Just like a real conversation. OTOH it won't sell much advertising for Steven.
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>> Just like a real conversation. OTOH it won't sell much advertising for Steven.
An advert has just appeared on this page.
" The End of Britain - How to survive the coming crisis."
Looks like there is an advert for every discussion!
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>> Is there such a thing as an urban badger?
We get so many badgers through our garden, I had to install a galvanized metal flap for them when I replaced the fence this spring. It's like a big cat flap. They would destroy the fence or dig under, giving my dog an escape route if we hadn't installed it, as they had with the old one. The foxes use it too, but my dog hasn't worked out how to use it to get at the scraps which next door put out on their lawn for the garden birds.
Whilst my house is in urban Reading, and fairly hear the centre, we're also only a couple of hundred yards/a few minutes walk from the Oxfordshire boundary and lots of open countryside and woodland.
There was a roadkill badger at the end of the street a few days ago, and slightly bizarrely I saw a dead one on a neighbour's doorstep on Christmas morning a few years ago (they were away for the holidays so we got the council to come and clear it away).
Never hit one with a car, but did get an indecisive squirrel a few weeks back. Crunch.
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>>Never hit one with a car, but did get an indecisive squirrel a few weeks back. Crunch.
Trying to establish the wot'llshedo? speed of my new Sunbeam Alpine sports car in Malaya, I ran over a pangolin (like an armadillo) at, I guess, 70-80 m.p.h. All four wheels must have left the ground but the car landed straight. I could see the creature in the mirror, trundling on as before.
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Urban badgers - Manatee
