Six Years In The Making
By the side of the single track lane that leads to my house is a small copse. Inside the copse is an old marl pit where this badger’s clan built their sett.
Each year, the badgers would make a well worn path from the copse, across the field to the lane, leaving a muddy line across the tarmac where they crossed the lane, before the path continued across the field on the other side.
I had hoped to make an image in daylight of the badgers as they used this path. After many long hours waiting, after six years of trying, I finally made this image.
Patience and perseverance are key to wildlife photography as they are in many fields of work.
Sadly, the badgers in this sett in the copse by the lane that leads to my house were slaughtered as part of the UK’s ongoing unscientific and barbaric cull, a cull that will do nothing to address Bovine TB in cattle.
“People come—they stay for a while, they flourish, they build—and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I’ve been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.”
Badger from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame