Bernie the badger, a miracle mother
AS a boy in the countryside, I was told that if a badger sank its teeth into any man — or beast — it would never let go.
A neighbour had a badger’s skin hanging in the rafters of an outhouse. The animal had been shot, for no reason other than it was wild and came out of a burrow, or sett, disturbed by dogs, in an area of sand dunes, home to many rabbits.
The skin, untreated, soon began to smell and was burned in a brazier used by the neighbour for boiling sheep heads for his greyhounds.
What happened to the carcass was a mystery. I didn’t think it went to the hounds but I wasn’t sure. These were the years of World War II, or the Emergency, and little was wasted. People saved paper bags — a good idea then, and now.
Small boys were excited by the thrill of danger brought about by hunting. “When badgers fight and everyone’s a foe/The dogs are clapt and urged to join the fray/The badger turns and drives them all away,” John Clare, poet of the English countryside, wrote in the 19th Century.
Clare saw a brutal end to a badger “kicked and torn and beaten out”, but a little book sent to me tells of one animal taken from the brink of death by caring humans and brought back to recovery and eventual return to the wild.
This badger was hit by a postal van and lay prostrate on the road. The postman saw a spark of life, and, as the Irish Seal Sanctuary premises was nearby, he alerted them. A vet confirmed the creature was alive.
The sanctuary founder, Brendan Price, tells the badger’s remarkable story in a soft-cover book, In Search of a Sanctuary.
The poor badger was carried in and “the postman, residents and local vets in this traditional farming community united to give the badger a chance”, writes the author. The animal was underweight, had bite marks and had been abroad in daylight and in bad weather, all mysterious. Perhaps she had been driven from her sett?
What began then was a programme of patient care for an animal which had to be treated “without a tyranny of nursing”.
Bernie was essentially her own physician, except by “one extraordinary intervention by one extraordinary vet”, writes Mr Price.
One hind quarter was found to be disabled, noticed as the animal began to move a little each day. The vet, with a field X-ray machine, found a damaged hip and performed a femoral ostectomy, open surgery of the ball-and-socket joint.
Bernie was moved to a bigger enclosure, soon making a sett with straw and hay. A great surprise was in store for her carers. In early March squeals were heard from deep within. A cub had arrived by delayed implantation, a new life after collision, trauma, and surgery!
At the end of June, Bernie dug beneath her sett, helped by her cub, and one day became free to roam in the wild again.
A badger-mother and wellgrown cub were seen later that year in that area of North Co Dublin. They were moving well.
The larger of the two had a marked flank where a new coat had not yet fully grown back.