Setts in the City
Next time you’re out after nightfall, keep your eyes open for a fluffy grey shape racing across the ground, or a striped white face flashing from the darkness. After years of persecution, the badgers are back in the Outdoor City.
“When people see a badger in their garden, it’s a little bit of magic, a chance to engage with something wild and mysterious that spends most of its life under the ground,” said Ian Cracknell of Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust.
“I recently saw a badger in Heeley, it was rooting about in the undergrowth with busy traffic passing nearby. It was incredible, I’d never seen a badger before in such an extraordinary place.” He added that a naturalist friend has even reported a badger outside a nightclub in Sheffield City Centre.
Sheffield’s hilly woodlands are ideal for badger setts, Ian said, and have been for many years. Brocco Bank, for example, was probably named after land habituated by Mr Brock and friends. (Brock is an alternative name for badgers, along with ‘grey’).
Badger numbers had been falling in Sheffield until legislation in 1992, when harming badgers and digging out their setts was finally forbidden by law.
The reduction in illegal badger baiting and hunting (although it does still take place) has allowed the country’s largest land predator to regain a sustainable level in the Outdoor City, with urban sightings increasing. The Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust’s Nabil Abbas said there could be several thousand badgers in Sheffield, with a few hundred of them making a living in our urban streets and gardens.
Earlier this year, however, the government announced that its plan for a highly controversial cull of badgers in response to rising TB in cattle could be extended to low risk areas for the disease, such as Sheffield and its surroundings.
The problem is, said Ian Cracknell, that apart from unnecessarily shooting hundreds of untested badgers who may or may not have been bovine TB carriers, there are much better ways to protect cattle from the disease. The answer is a combination of ‘bio-security’ measures for cattle movement and feeding, along with badger vaccination, he says.
Figures cited from culls in south west England suggest a small reduction in bovine TB after culls, but the likelihood is that this was due to improved security measures, said Ian, like keeping cattle feed away from badgers and rodents, and monitoring and separating animals brought in from other farms.
“There’s good evidence that culling doesn’t offer any meaningful change in the incidence of TB in cattle, or actually makes it worse,” Ian said,
Mass culls lead to the ‘perturbation’ effect, where surviving badgers scatter to new areas and outside badgers move back in, potentially spreading any infection.
The success of a nearby badger vaccination scheme around Edale in Derbyshire is encouraging farmers to see the benefits of the much cheaper vaccination approach, and Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust have now launched an appeal to set up a vaccination programme in South Yorkshire.
The Trust aims to raise £50,000 to initially train vaccinators, carry out surveys and discussions with local farmers, and then buy vaccines and equipment and enlist volunteers to help with the programme, which will last several years.
“It must be terrible for farmers to have to slaughter whole herds of cattle, and we’ve been lucky in this area not to have suffered that high incidence of TB in cattle,” said Ian Cracknell. “We’re keen to work with farmers who want to keep it that way.”
“A vaccination project is far superior to a cull,” said Graham Shepherd of the South Yorkshire Badger Group. “Many local farmers are keen to keep their clean badgers in situ and other badgers out.”
If bovine TB numbers rise from the single incident so far noted in Sheffield, the Trust feel there is a real possibility of a cull, which could take local badger numbers back to the times when baiting and hunting were rife.
Ian said: “There are now badgers throughout Sheffield’s hills and valleys, and there are setts in the city. If we can vaccinate our badgers we’ll be able to demonstrate that badger culling doesn’t need to come here.”
More info: https://www.wildsheffield.com/badgers