Home › Volumes › American Animals › Weasels, Otters, Etc.
American Badger
Images coming soon.
- Length
- 27 inches.
- Description
- Body rather thick set and flat, feet rather short, claws on fore feet very large, tail short. Colour, grayish, mottled with black on the back in irregular transverse bands; tail gray; lower parts dirty white; centre of face black, including the eyes and region just above them; a white median stripe from the nape nearly to the snout; sides of face and throat white; a large black patch in front of each ear. Legs and feet black.
- Range
- Western North America, east to Wisconsin and Texas--formerly to Ohio.
This flat, thick-hided, long-haired creature differs from its long-suffering European cousin chiefly in its more carnivorous diet, and in preferring wide-stretching flatlands to dark forests, such as the Old World badger loves to hide in.
But if badgering and badger-baiting had ever been popular in this country, our species would unquestionably have put up as invincible a defence against the dogs urged on to torture it as ever badger did, its skin being equally tough and its jaws possessed of the same relentless bull-dog grip, locking themselves mechanically as they close. If left alone, however, the badger is a very timid, gentle and, in a way, useful animal.
It lives in burrows of its own digging and is exceedingly cautious about exposing itself by day; comparatively few people have been so fortunate as to see one except when caught in a trap in its doorway, or drowned out.
When by any chance a badger happens to be at any distance from its hole when approached, he usually prefers lying quiet in the grass to making any run for it, being decidedly heavy and slow of foot. At such time he will flatten himself down almost like a door mat or a turtle. His long silky gray hair, parted in the middle down along his spine, spreads out into the grass on each side, so that he seems to be only a slight hummock in the prairie, undoubtedly often deceiving the keenest sighted into passing without so much as suspecting his presence.
Even in a cage he will practice the same ruse to escape notice. I have seen one spread himself out on the dirt which covered the bottom of his cage, so successfully that out of every twenty people passing close by him to stare at the miserable captives in the neighbouring cages, I am positive not more than one or two at most realized that his cage had an occupant; his black and white striped head, looking so conspicuous in a mounted skin, was somehow no more in evidence than his fog-tinted fur.
The badger feeds principally on gophers, field mice, ground squirrels, prairie dogs and such, like humble earth folk, laying open their burrows with his strong claws faster than they can dig away through the earth in their efforts to escape him. He also eats grasshoppers, beetles, small snakes, etc.
In cold weather he keeps to his den, probably wholly dormant, for on appearing again in the spring, after months of confinment underground, he is still almost as fat as in the preceding autumn.