Parks Canada - Teachers' Corner - American Badger - The Badger 5Ws

The Badger 5Ws: who, what, where, why, when

PDF ~ 197Kb

WHO?

• Badgers belong to the weasel family.

• There are seven different species of badger, including the African honey badger and the Indonesian stink badger. Only one species is found in North America: the American badger.

• The American badger’s scientific name is Taxidea taxus

  Kingdom: Animalia
  Phylum: Chordata
  Class: Mammalia
  Order: Carnivora
  Family: Mustelidae
  Genus: Taxidea
  Species: taxus
  Subspecies: jeffersonii

• There are four subspecies of the American badger in North America:

  • Taxidea taxus taxus (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba)

  • Taxidea taxus jeffersonii (British Columbia)

  • Taxidea taxus berlandieri (southern United States and northern Mexico)

  • Taxidea taxus jacksoni (southern Ontario)

• In Alberta, the American badger (taxus subspecies) is ranked as a Sensitive species.

• The American badger (jacksoni subspecies) was listed as endangered by the Committee On The Status of Endangered Wildlife In Canada in 2000 (www.cosewic.ca).

The American badger (jeffersoni subspecies) was also listed as endangered by the COSEWIC in 2000.

WHAT?

Physical Description (WHAT do badgers look like?)

• The badger has a flattened body, more wide than tall. This body shape makes it easy to slip into its burrow.

• The badger is grey to rusty brown, with a clearly marked face that makes it easy to identify. It has a white stripe that runs from the tip of its nose to its shoulders. Its cheeks are also white, except for an obvious black mark on each cheek. This mark, or ‘badge’, gives the badger its name.

• Males are larger than females, and can weigh as much as 14kg (that’s around the size of a BIG turkey). Their length, from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail, varies from about 60cm (think about the height of that turkey) to 90cm (think of a meter, or yard stick, then take away a bit).

• Badger legs are short, bowed, and powerful. The front feet have long, sharp claws for digging, and the back feet have shorter claws that are used as shovels to scoop away dirt.

Food (WHAT do badgers eat?)

• The badger is adapted to catch small burrowing animals. It uses it keen senses of smell and hearing to hunt. Ground squirrels, marmots and pocket gophers are B.C. badgers’ favourite foods, but they’ll also eat other small mammals, birds, fish, insects, and even rattlesnakes!

• One way badgers will often hunt is by following their prey into the prey’s burrow, and then digging the animal out.

• Sometimes badgers will hunt ground squirrels on the ground (above ground), chasing, and then capturing their prey.

• Perhaps the most surprising hunting method badgers may use is to hide in the entrance of a prey’s burrow, and then capture the prey when it comes back to its burrow (after giving it a big scare, no doubt!)

Family (WHAT is the badger’s family life like?)

• Badgers are solitary animals (meaning they live alone) for most of the time. Two times this rule doesn’t work is when male and female badgers meet up in late summer for mating, and when female badgers raise their young (from early spring to around late summer).

• Baby badgers (kits) are born in the spring, around April.

• Female badgers give birth to one to five furry, blind kits, whose eyes open after four to six weeks. In B.C., the average litter size is 1.4 kits.

• Mother badgers suckle their young for around twelve weeks, and then bring back small dead animals to the den for their kits to eat.

• Young badgers stay with their mothers until around late August, when they leave home and try to find a home range of their own. This is a very difficult time in the life of a badger.

• Badgers can live up to 14 years old in the wild, but usually only live to four or five years old.

WHERE?

Geography (WHERE are badgers found?)

• Badgers in B.C. live in the dry, southern interior valleys of the province, from the border with the United States of America up to the Cariboo Region in central B.C. They like grasslands and open forests of Ponderosa Pine or Douglas-fir trees.

• Badgers also use other open habitats from valley bottoms right up to alpine meadows. They can be found using areas that were burnt by forest-fires, or cleared through forest harvesting.

• In B.C., badgers have large home ranges, up to 500km². These home ranges may overlap, but American badgers generally stay to themselves.

Homes (WHERE are badgers’ homes? What do their homes look like?)

• Badgers live in burrows up to 9m long and 3m deep (that’s roughly the size of a big school bus). The entrance to the burrow is about the size of a sheet of paper (30cm wide by 20cm tall), and has a large pile of dirt on the doorstep.

• Badgers use many burrows within their home range, and for many reasons. These include daytime resting (naps), winter sleeping (but not true hibernation, like hoary marmots, for example), food storage, raising young, and as a home base for hunting trips.

• If a badger moves to a new area where it doesn’t have a burrow, it builds a new one. The badger will either move into an animal burrow made by someone else and renovate (by making it bigger), or build a new burrow from scratch.

WHY?

WHY are badgers special?

• Badgers are rare in B.C., with a population now of about 250 adults.

• Badgers now are seen as a keystone species in the grassland ecosystem. This means the badger helps support the other species that live in the same ecosystem. If the badger was no longer there, the balance of the ecosystem would be upset and many other species would be affected.

• Badgers in B.C. are ranked as endangered by COSEWIC (The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada), and are on the B.C. government’s red list. This means that scientists are worried that there may not be enough badgers in the wild. If there are too few badgers, it’s possible that, in the future, there will no longer be any badgers in the wild in B.C.
  

WHY are badgers endangered?

• The adult badger doesn’t have many natural predators. Cougars, coyotes, bobcats, ravens and golden eagles will prey on the badger, but usually they go after the young, or juveniles.

• The biggest threat to badgers is humans and human activities. Many places where we live and work, such as valley bottoms, are places badgers used to live.

• Towns, hydroelectric development, and highways and railways are a few examples of human activities that have taken away badger habitat.

• Every year, many badgers are killed by accidents with cars, trucks, and trains.

• Also, badgers’ favourite food is the Columbia ground squirrel (often called the gopher). Some people think of ground squirrels as pests, and kill them. If people kill Columbia ground squirrels, there are fewer for badgers to eat, so badgers may go hungry.

Is there a happy ending for badgers in B.C.?

• That question hasn’t been answered. But you can make a difference, and reading and learning about badgers is a great first step.

GO TO BAT FOR BADGERS!

• Stewardship = taking care of something of value. Here are some ideas to help you help the badger:
  1. Report badger sightings and burrow locations.
  2. Protect known badgers and burrows from disturbance.
  3. Tolerate ground squirrels, badgers’ favourite food.
  4. Learn more about badgers, and tell others about just how great these animals really are.

WHEN?

WHEN can I see a badger?

• It’s very hard to see a badger because they’re shy animals and they’re nocturnal. But here is a link to tips on badger watching: www.badgers.org.uk/brocks-world/08watch01.html

WHEN will badgers not be endangered in B.C.?

• That’s a question no one can answer for sure because there is no easy answer. Right now, we don’t have a magic number, that if we were able to get that many badgers back in B.C., they would no longer be endangered here. Factors such as population decline (how much, how fast), and population distribution are considered before animals are taken off the COSEWIC endangered list… and here in B.C. we are still trying to find out how many badgers live here, and all the places they may call home.

• There is the chance that badgers never will be able to recover to a population size similar to what it used to be. Some researchers are saying it’s possible and worthwhile to manage badgers as endangered… which means their numbers won’t get as high as before (way back when) but also means that their numbers won’t get so low that they won’t be able to survive in B.C.

What was it like for badgers way-back-WHEN?

• In Britain, people used to enjoy the so-called sport of badger baiting. A badger was put in a barrel open only at one end and then aggressive dogs were placed in front of the barrel. The dogs would try to kill the trapped badger. Because of this “sport”, when we say someone is ‘badgering us’, it means they are teasing, annoying or harassing us.

• Life wasn’t much better for badgers in North America in the late 19th and early 20^th centuries. Settlers establishing and running their farms thought of badgers as pests, and so the animals were shot, trapped and poisoned.

• Today, there is almost no protection for badgers in the U.S.A., where they often are still poorly thought of as ‘vermin’. In B.C., badgers have been protected from trapping and hunting on public land since 1967.

LINKS

• http://www.pc.gc.ca/pn-np/bc/kootenay/natcul/natcul30_e.asp
  Kootenay National Park’s Web site has information on badger basics, badger conservation, badger research and local stories of stewardship in the Columbia Valley… and a lot more.

• http://www.badgers.org.uk/brocks-world/index.html
  Information on badgers, including badger true stories, badger pictures, and badger poems. It’s from the United Kingdom, so first talks about the Eurasian badger, but there’s still a lot of information about the other species of badger, including the American badger.

• http://www.speciesatrisk.gc.ca/search/species
  Details_e.cfm?SpeciesID=621
  Environment Canada’s Species at Risk Web site features the endangered North American badger subspecies jacksonii

• http://www.badgers.bc.ca
  The National Recovery Team’s Web site for the endangered jeffersonii subspecies of North American badger in British Columbia that looks at badger basics, research, and conservation.

Note: To read the PDF version you need Adobe Acrobat Reader on your system.

If the Adobe download site is not accessible to you, you can download Acrobat Reader from an accessible page.

If you choose not to use Acrobat Reader you can have the PDF file converted to HTML or ASCII text by using one of the conversion services offered by Adobe.