🏗️ The Burial Process: A Feat of Engineering
The badger was captured on video burying a calf carcass that weighed approximately 50 pounds (23 kg). The time-lapse footage showed the sheer determination and method the badger used:
- Excavation, Not Pushing: The badger did not try to push the heavy carcass into a hole. Instead, it focused its efforts on digging around and beneath the calf.
- Strategic Tunnelling: Over the course of five days, the badger dug tunnels beneath the center of the carcass. As the soil was removed, the tunnels would eventually collapse, causing the calf to sink gradually into the widening crater until it was level with the ground.
- Backfilling and Caching: Once the calf was secured deep in the ground, the badger spent several more days backfilling the hole with dirt, completely covering the carcass. It left only a small entrance point for itself.
- Monopolizing the Meal: The badger then constructed a den right next to the cache and spent over 11 continuous days underground feasting on its private meat supply. It continued to return to the cache for about two months.
🔬 Scientific Significance: More Than Just a Snack
While badgers are known to cache (bury and store) smaller prey like ground squirrels and rabbits, this was the first scientifically documented instance of an American Badger burying an animal significantly larger than itself.
The discovery has profound ecological implications:
- Refrigeration and Sequestration: The underground burial acts like a “natural refrigerator,” keeping the meat cool and slowing decomposition, allowing the food source to last much longer. It also hides the meal from aerial scavengers like vultures and ravens, allowing the badger to monopolize the nutrient source.
- Nutrient Cycling: This behavior suggests badgers may play a much larger role in nutrient cycling across Western North America than previously thought, sequestering large amounts of carrion that would otherwise feed other organisms or decompose on the surface.
- Disease Control: Researchers speculated that by burying carcasses, badgers may actually be providing an ecological service to ranchers by sealing away potentially diseased carrion before it can infect other livestock.
- Widespread Behavior: The study recorded another badger at a separate site attempting the same feat, suggesting this behavior is not a one-off anomaly but a widespread, though previously unobserved, caching strategy for the species.
The unexpected video footage provided a rare glimpse into the nocturnal and subterranean life of an enigmatic animal, proving that even seemingly well-understood behaviors in nature can hold major surprises.
You can watch the amazing time-lapse video of the burial here: Badger burying a cow – YouTube.
