I apologize for the crappy pic, but all I had was my little point and shoot. That, and well its hard to take a picture when you are gently reaching as close as you can get with one hand while keeping delicate, tender and painfully exposed toes away from the snarling badger. In hind sight a video would have been entertaining.
My second badger of the summer came in the middle of the night while walking back to the truck. We were in an area where the mountains come right down to the edge of the stream we were surveying, so we were crossing in, over, and around rocky ridges and the sandy washes between them trying to get back to the truck. As we descended down into this draw we were constantly trying to keep a look out for burros. The last thing I want is to corner a burro on a narrow trail with the only thing to defend myself with being a net. As we got down into the draw though there was something else I should have been looking out for....
We started across the sand and heard some brush moving in front of us about 20 feet away. It was close to the ground, and we had seen many jack rabbits in here before, so I didn't think anything of it. As we passed that area out of no where a group of about 6 javalinas came storming out of the thick brush! There was no time to react, as they ran within feet of us and straight through some of the thickest brush out there. No stopping them, they just put there heads down and boom straight through, creating holes as they went. The noise and commotion and proximity definitely got my heart rate up. I imagine they'd have the same disregard to my legs as they would to the woody vegetation they just ripped a hole through. As I turned to keep going down our trail, something moved in the hole in the ground ahead of us
With just enough time to get off this grainy picture, he came out essentially saying "umm, what the crap was all that noise???" before turning back into his hole.
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