Meles meles were culled in the UK for spreading TB to cattle.
ON my morning walks with my hunting dog in West Somerset, United Kingdom five years ago, I often found tell-tale signs of badger activity outside the holes leading to their setts. These were in the form of droppings, footprints in the soil excavated and badger hair caught on vegetation. Sometimes at
night, as they are nocturnal mammals, without night vision equipment I only caught a glimpse of their eyes in my torchlight. Sadly, but inevitably, there are fewer signs of these animals today. Why?
Ten years ago many of the fields around my house held large dairy cattle herds. Two years later many of them had to slaughtered and then incinerated, as they had contracted bovine tuberculosis. It is thought that they had contracted TB from badgers, so in August 2013, a full culling of badgers as directed by the government agency Defra (Department of the Environment, Farming and Rural Agency), occurred in my region. It was expected that 5,000 badgers would be culled by controlled shooting or by free shooting over a six-week period to tackle the cycle of infection between badgers and cattle.
Whilst few European badgers (Meles meles) are now around in my area, and none are found dead on local roads any longer having been killed by night drivers, slowly cattle are reappearing in fields. There is much debate as to whether this initial cull was effective but, at least, it was humanely executed. Prior to this method, farmers would send Jack Russell terriers into setts or use poisonous gases to exterminate them.
That said, I have recently noticed more hedgehogs than ever before in my garden. They are excellent eradicators of garden slugs and my plants this year are thriving. Hedgehogs are a favourite meal together with earthworms for the omnivorous badger. During food shortages in World War II, badger meat became a delicacy in the UK. Badger hair is still often used in the manufacture of artists’ paint brushes and in shaving brush bristles. Today most of these articles are made in China, where these animals (Meles leucurus) have been a major crop-threat to farmers and are consequently treated as vermin and hunted in large numbers for their pelts.
An iconic British mammal, figuring as a wise observer in Kenneth Grahame’s novel ‘The Wind in the Willows’ and with a local ale named Badgers Beer, a once common animal in certain areas of the British countryside is now under threat.
The Bornean ferret-badger
This animal is even more elusive. Officially it is known as Melogale everetti, Everett’s ferret-badger or the Kinabalu ferret-badger. This is one of only two species of badger found in Borneo. The other species is the skunk badger, which has a black body with a white stripe along its back to its stub-like tail. It takes its name from the foul smelling spray it emits from under its tail whenever threatened.
Everett’s ferret-badger was named after Alfred Hart Everett (1848 to 1898), a British civil servant, who was the Resident of the Baram District in Sarawak
and who explored the Bau and Niah caves. Later he worked for the North Borneo Company in Sabah. An avid collector of zoological specimens, he regularly sent these to the Natural History Museum in London for identification.
Not surprisingly 10 birds, four mammals, three snakes, one frog and one fish bear his name.
In 1892, MR Oldfield Thomas, the then assistant keeper of mammalia at the British Natural History Museum, published a paper entitled ‘On some new Bornean mammals’, in which the Bornean ferret-badger was first recorded as a distinct species of badger and thus named after Everett.
Over a century and a quarter later, we still have much to learn about this unique mammal.
What we do know
The Bornean ferret-badger’s domain is essentially that of high montane forest between 900 and 3,700 metres above sea level around Mount Kinabalu and also in the higher parts of the Crocker Range. It is thought that these mammals may be found elsewhere in Brunei, Sarawak and in Kalimantan.
Near the Mount Kinabalu Massif, at Penampang and Tuaran, old stuffed specimens can be seen in local museums. Ferret-badgers’ bones and teeth dating from 20,000 years before the present have been found in the sediments of the cave floors at Niah. These finds were first recorded by the Earl of Cranbrook in his Sarawak Museum Journal Papers, suggesting that at such a low altitude as the Niah Caves, the climate then, during the last Ice Age, was very much colder than today.
The Bornean ferret badger is the smallest species of all badgers.
Characteristics
The Kinabalu ferret-badger has a ferret-shaped head with a distinctive dark face mask with pale buff-coloured patches of fur beneath its chin and a brown body ending in a bushy tail. Undoubtedly it is the smallest species of all badgers, omnivorous in diet but preferring to eat ants, termites, earthworms, frogs, snails and the carcasses of small birds and mammals, birds’ eggs and fruit.
Unlike the European badger (although, it too, has the capability, with its sharp claws, of digging out its setts) it prefers to occupy already created holes in the ground.
Like most species of badger, the Bornean ferret-badger has a likely lifespan of about 10 years.
After mating with a boar, the sow gives birth to one or two cubs. As this species of badger is also nocturnal in its movements, very little is known about its actual population size, as it is so scarcely seen. Villagers in the Mount Kinabalu National Park have seen these ferret-badgers attacking their garbage bins at night in much the same way as European badgers now do in suburban areas in the UK.
To date, most records on the Bornean ferret-badger are confined to the Mount Kinabalu National Park area, but the 21st century has seen an increasing number of zoologists showing much interest in this particular species of mammal.
Fortunately the Sabah Wildlife Conservation Act of 1997 has registered the Bornean ferret-badger as worthy of protection as a small and most elusive mammal. Further fieldwork and research is needed, and with night vision cameras readily available, maybe in five to 10 years all may be revealed.
For a glimpse of the Kinabalu ferret-badger go to www.arkive.org.