The badger is doing well in our province. Research by the Dassenwerkgroep Drenthe shows that about 1500 to 1750 badgers live here. There won’t be much more, says Aaldrik Pot of the working group.
Badgers live in underground burrows. These can be whole systems of burrows and corridors where an extensive badger family lives. Our province had more than 620 of these main castles last year.
What makes counting badgers complicated is that a badger family also has all kinds of other burrows. Near the main castle is often a kind of secondary castle, which father tie as man cave used when mothers are with young.
In addition, there are temporary castles and separate mini-fortresses that are inhabited when something tasty can be found somewhere.
The badger working group has been following the badgers in Drenthe for almost thirty years and has been very focused in the last ten years. Aaldrik Pot has listed the figures.
“What we did find out is that it is much more complicated with those castles than we thought. We first thought: you have a main castle, and then you have a large castle further on, that is a main castle again, but that’s how it works It’s not. Such a family maintains a whole complex of different castles at different distances that are sometimes temporarily inhabited.”
For example, one family can maintain up to four castle complexes, while only one castle is inhabited. “They do maintain those other castles, but if you put cameras there, you see that they do not spend the night in them. And if you only look at the number of castles, and do not properly investigate whether it is a permanently inhabited main castle or not, then you quickly count more badgers than there really are,” says Pot.
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