Badgers in Kingston

 

Badgers mark their territories by pooing into a scrape in the soil. Sometimes they 'poos' can be soft and other times quite 'well formed'. The photograph is taken from a series of latrines around a development site in Chessington. Badgers are not mentioned in the ecology reports for the proposed development.

Badgers and development do not site well together. A development can curtail the access a badger has to resources and safe trackways that may have been used for generations. Developments that do not consider Badgers, can push animals into roads, where they can cause accidents. 

Over the years, I have written several posts regarding Badgers and development, mainly around Kingston Hill including the Golf Courses coombe-wood-lawn-tennis-. This included two sites owned/developed by Kingston Council, -although the Council were not the applicant for the licence to close the sett - failure to accomodate badger movement, appears to have pushed these animals into suboptimal areas, where they have been more of a nuisance. 

In a recent school 'permitted development' where badgers are very well known, a major relandscaping plan has produced no ecology reports and badgers have  not been considered.

Badgers are a so-called protected species. They do not seem to have very much protection in our borough where persecution is evident and the number of licences to exclude them is on the increase. A recent Freedom of Information request to  Natural England’s Wildlife Licensing Team confirmed a total of 20 licences have been issued in the past 5 years in Kingston-Upon-Thames, with the postcode ‘KT’. Thehe following licences had been granted in the borough:

 

 Badger licences issued in Kingston 2020-March 25 

A man from Lancaster Gardens, Kingston upon Thames, was fined £1,600 for destroying a Badger sett in his garden after being refused a licence to close down the sett in its entirety. -convicted-for-destroying-badger-sett-243781 

Badger crime is increasing for a number of reasons, it doesn't help that the Government have decided to continue the Badger Cull in some areas of the country, as it sends confusing signals to the public.

You can report Badger crime to the Badgers Trust https://www.badgertrust.org.uk/report but remeber they are mostly volunteers and will have to prioritise. Road casualties can also be reported here in the case of lactating females where cubs might be at risk.

Protecting Badgers via the LNRS or Local Nature Recovery Strategy currently being rolled out by the Greater London Authority, is a possiblility. That is, protecting  linear corridors of land for the continued safe movement of animals around their wooded gardens, parks and golf courses. Although it is feared that by the time the strategy which has no legal backing, is rolled out, most of these informal pathways and trackways will be gone.