Given the body count it’s strange badgers have not yet turned militant – but given time they will
THIS IS a column about dead badgers. I appreciate that a bank holiday is perhaps not the best time to read about dead badgers. But then, as the editor of the opinion pages put it – rather tartly – when is a good time to read about dead badgers?
On Sunday, April 10th, driving from Dublin to Tralee, I saw six dead badgers. It seemed a remarkable number. I’m a townie, I’m not used to this much death. I was alone, so could not make a note of where exactly on the route each corpse lay. I think four were on the motorway before Limerick, and two on the older road after, but that’s just a guess.
On the way back from Cork city the following Thursday I saw two dead badgers.
Yet driving up and down to Belfast last Thursday, there were no dead badgers at all – just two dead hedgehogs, or what looked like hedgehogs.
There is a special slot on the roadkill website for dead animals whose species is not apparent. “Unidentified: Anime sans nomine”, is the name of the category. In fact the Latin names are only given for a few species. The hare: Lepus timidus hibernicus. Awww, as our teenage acquaintances would say. The short-eared owl: Asio flammeus. The American Mink: Mustela vison. The badger is Meles meles, which has the virtue of consistency.
Badgers are quite big, and hard to miss when they are lying at the verge of the road – although not quite so hard to miss while driving at night, it seems.
I have only seen a dead otter on the road once, in Connemara. Road killings are thought to be a significant threat to that population, and the otters are turning nasty. See the front page of last Tuesday’s Sun: “Devil Otter Ate My Mini Van”.
The badgers, as far as we can tell, have yet to turn militant. But given this body count, it’s only a matter of time before they do. They are a protected species, for God’s sake. Time to ring the National Park and Wildlife Service (NPWS). Always good to come into contact with a functioning public institution.
Apparently all major new roads in the last eight to 10 years have had mammal underpasses built into them, as a result of consultation between the wildlife experts and the National Roads Authority. (If only the humans had had representatives meeting the NRA, we could have had public lavatories included in the motorway plans. Wouldn’t that have been nice? But this is an ungracious cavil in the current context.)
The type of fencing along these motorways is critical, according to Dr Ferdia Murnell of the NPWS. It has to be a chain link fence, to prevent the mammals attempting to cross the road. It seems roads traverse established paths through the countryside which the animals use. Like the old joke, they’ll keep crossing the road, even if an increasing number of them never get to the other side. So the fence has to be well maintained.
Perhaps, I think in my uninformed way, it is a variation in the quality of the type of fence and its maintenance that explains six dead badgers on the Dublin to Tralee route, and the fact there were none on the M1.
In the UK there’s murder going on at the moment because the National Trust, one of the biggest landowners in Britain, has said it will not object to badgers being shot on its lands. All sides are agreed the badgers, like other native wild mammals, carry bovine TB. The question is whether they transfer it to cattle, or pick it up from them. Who gives what to whom, and how much, is the unresolved issue. An oral vaccine placed in bait – the method was successful in reducing rabies on the Continent – is still some years away. Culls can be counterproductive, as they displace diseased animals. (I got this from the Guardian, not the NPWS.)
Of course, the sight of six dead badgers on the road from Dublin to Tralee does make you think the countryside on either side of the motorway must be fairly bouncing with them.
Looking at the roadkill on the verges is one of the ways in which native populations are monitored. According to Dr Murnell, their increasing presence in the roadkill figures was one of the first indications of the resurgence of the pine marten. That’s why we’re all encouraged to report roadkill sightings to the roadkill survey, at biology.ie. I can’t find a phone number on their website on which sightings could also be reported.
It is the truth universally acknowledged that nothing annoys country people more than Dubliners wittering on about rural wildlife. But let me put it this way: tourists don’t like seeing dead badgers on the roadside either. What do you think the Brits are going to think? You know what they’re like about animals.
It’s kind of hard to sell yourself as the wildlife sanctuary of nasty, industrial Europe while the highways and byways of the country are carpeted with dead badgers. Although, God knows, we’ve tried.