Badgers Use Remote Controls and Watches

Although it appears, from the lack of blog posts about them recently, that our badgers have not been visiting this is far from the case.  Our Banditos (as I affectionately call them now) appear every night pretty much without fail.  In fact for the past month I had been trying to catch on camera how they manage to get into our fenced off vegetable patch but without success.  It was almost as if they had a remote control for the camera which would switch off just at the moment of discovery only to then switch on again once they were inside the boundaries.  Some nights the camera would fail to work at all for no technical reason only for us to discover definite evidence of badger ingress in the form of a big hole with badger poo in it.  This is why I now call them Black and White Banditos; that and all the other wonderful forms of mischief they have revealed to us over the last couple of years (for more examples of this you only have to search for badger posts on our blog).

With the failed attempts at discovering the weak spot in the fence and the time for planting an overwintering crop in our veg patch passed, I gave up on filming them and decided to instead open up a section of the fence and let them into our veg patch.  After all, if they wanted to be there, I might as well make it easier for them.  I was also rather hoping they would at least dig over the ground for us as well as bring them closer to our front window and allow us a closer look at them.  They are after all far more entertaining to watch than TV on these dark nights.

So without fail, the female Bandito arrived, found the gap in the fence and sniffed out the handful of peanuts I had left her.  She happily chomped away for a while and then got spooked when she heard voices along the road.  She made a break for it, not through the already opened gap, but under a pile of jasmine cuttings where we thought she was momentarily hiding until she popped up on the other side of the fence having effortlessly squeezed her furry frame underneath it.  And there was me thinking my homemade beach scavenged fishing net fence was thoroughly fixed down.  It might have been designed for catching fish but clearly not my Banditos.  The wonderful irony was that we had to let them into the 'out of bounds' area in order to discover how they had been getting in in the first place!  Technology had failed to reveal the answer but removing the boundaries had!  That could be a really good lesson in life.

So for the last few nights we have been watching the wonders of our Banditos close up and personal right under the window.  Their timing has been impeccable.  After the clocks changed I expected them to turn up an hour earlier than usual; I mean after all they don't wear watches.....do they?  You see that's the thing, they didn't show up early.  They showed up at the usual clock time and have continued to do so ever since.  So you tell me, how do they tell the time?

Those clever Banditos!