Lancashire Badger Group

Annual General Meeting (AGM) Report 2003

22nd March 2003

The hotpot-or-cheesebake supper was as usual a great success!

A very informative article by Gary Ligatt about badgers and the work of the badger group was published in Lancashire Today, in its October issue. It included some fantastic pictures of the badgers at our hide.

Membership remains stable, and the new look of the Group's thrice-yearly Newsletter has proved a great success.

Two committee members attended the National Federation of Badger Groups conference in Somerset last year.

The Lancashire Wildlife Trust in May opened Coal Wood Reserve and several members attended the opening day and gave information about badgers and the work of the Group.
Badger Day this year took place at Beacon Fell; the Group attended with the stall, which along with the badger-related slideshows run by Group members continues to inform and entertain the public and provide a useful income for the Group's badger protection activities.

Eleven Forestry applications affecting badgers were queried and dealt with over the year. The new capability to place setts on square mile grid maps has proved very useful for presenting to consultants. Badger set record information was in demand from various consultants and the small charge made for this complemented the larger fees from several recent surveys the Group has carried out. The Group commissioned George Pearce (the badger consultant who has presented several riveting slideshows at previous AGMs), to carry out the survey for one of the quarry extension landfill projects dealt with.

The sett at Foulridge which had been dug around Christmas 2001 was capped in the autumn of last year under licence. The turf was removed, heavy mesh sheets interlocked and wired together laid over the entire extent of the sett beneath, and the turf replaced. The area soon recovers and a few months later it is difficult to tell that a sett has been capped. A mini-digger was used at this site, which reduced the work to just one day. Signs of badgers returning have been reported. It is interesting to note that there is evidence that badger-diggers returned to the site and performed an experimental dig to see what had been done: members were pleased to hear that the capping operation appears to have foiled further activities of this sort at that sett.

Owing to the provision of a new building for Burnley Youth Theatre, the badgers who resided under the existing building (apparently undisturbed by noisy disco dances and so forth on the wooden floor above) had to be excluded under licence. This was carried out by George Pearce, with help from several local members. This proved difficult, being set back to square one several times by repeated acts of vandalism to the gates, but was finally completed and the badgers re-housed in the adjacent woodland. Interestingly, the badgers showed an unusual persistence in attempting to re-enter the sett through the one-way gates, and a theory was put forward that they were fond of the smell of the beeswax floor polish which was used on the floor above their sleeping-quarters!

The guest speaker this year was Colin Seddon of the Secret World Sanctuary in Somerset, who gave a fascinating and informative slide show and talk on the rehabilitation and release of Badgers back into the wild. Released badgers are tattooed according to agreed codes so that deaths such as road traffic casualties add to the pool of knowledge of badger movements and habits and can help the Sanctuary judge the success of the release programme. All badgers scheduled for release are blood-tested for TB: unfortunately the blood test is very inefficient and badgers whose blood contains antibodies to the disease and are in fact therefore actually immune to it will test positive. All such reactors are put down. The presence of the actual disease can only be ascertained after death, and it is a sad fact that of the last thirteen positive reactors which had to be put down ONLY TWO WERE FOUND TO ACTUALLY HAVE THE DISEASE when examined post-mortem. It should be remembered that there has never been TB found in badgers in Lancashire: it nevertheless casts a blight over badgers in other counties, which continue to be blamed for being susceptible to a cattle disease widely reported to have its origins in poor management of farm livestock.

In the Lancashire region, thirty badgers were reported as road traffic casualties during the course of the year. It is not known if this represents evidence of an increase in badger numbers or a greater awareness on the part of the public that such finds should be reported.