Can a badger bury an entire cow calf by itself? ‘No’ – you would probably say, but the fact is that a single badger can accomplish this difficult task by itself.
A badger has been caught in a camera set up in the Great Basin Desert in Utah to study the behavior of the animal. The camera footage shows how a badger buried an entire cow by itself to protect its food from other animals.
“Camera traps documented 2 solitary American badgers (Taxidea taxus) independently caching juvenile domestic cow (Bos taurus) carcasses during late winter 2016 in the Great Basin Desert of Utah,” the study reveals.
“One carcass was partially buried and the other was entirely buried. Both badgers constructed dens alongside their cache, where they slept, fed, and spent up to 11 days continuously underground. They abandoned the sites 41 and 52 days after initial discovery. While badgers are known to scavenge and to cache small food items underground, this is the first evidence of an American badger caching an animal carcass larger than itself.”
This study was carried out by researchers from the University of Utah, who were actually studying the ecology of scavengers in the Great Basin during winter. They set up seven calf carcasses in Utah’s Grassy Mountains, and also installed cameras to capture activity of any a scavenger.
Evan Buechley, a doctoral candidate, when visited the site after a week, he found one of the carcasses missing.
“When I first got there I was bummed because it’s hard to get these carcasses, to haul them out and set them up,” he said in a press release.
“I thought ‘Oh, well we’ve lost one after a week.’”
“Right on the spot I downloaded the photos.”
“I was expecting we were going to get a lot of vultures and maybe some eagles and coyotes and different things,” said Buechley.
“But then this badger stole the show.”
“We didn’t go out to study badgers specifically, but the badger declared itself to us.”
When the team watched the video footage, they found that a male badger had actually buried the cow calf and was regularly returning to the site to feed itself. This routine activity lasted for a few months.
According to the researchers, this is the first time that badgers have been observed burying a carcass that is many times bigger than themselves.
The detailed findings of the study have been published in the science journal Western North American Naturalist.
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