The waiting is part of it, of course, and so is the uncertainty. I know this little patch of steep earth pretty well, a miniature valley devoid of any human logic. I probably know it better than my own garden, because I have stared at it so often and so long. It is familiar in other ways, too: from an eminence, you look down on to the field of play. It is like the press box at a sports ground, places I have spent half my life reporting on events for this newspaper.

In sport you never know what will happen next. But when you look for wildlife you don’t know if anything will happen at all. So you must put all eagerness aside and assume a glassy stare, looking down over the precipitous slope, with its soft, friable earth, and slip into a state that is neither excitement nor its reverse. Letting what happens happen. If you fail to see a badger you can always become a Zen monk.

I was back at one of my favourite spots, the Margaret Grimwade badger hide, named for one of my favourite wildlife people. She introduced me to badgers, and the hide is named in her memory, for all the great conservation work she did for badgers and for the Suffolk Wildlife Trust.

I took my place in this most beloved of sheds. Comfy seats, because badger-watching is hard on the bottom. Sealed windows, to keep your scent locked away: if you want to be invisible, you must be unsmellable. After that, you wait. It is as easy, as difficult as that.

The land before the hide is not natural. That is to say, it is not shaped by wind and water and the other forces that sculpt our landscape. This landscape is an artefact, created, maintained and constantly improved by paw of badger. A badger digs as a human sings: for the sheer joy of it.

You have nothing to do but contemplate this masterpiece created by generation after generation, as the light fades. A song thrush sang the day’s last song, but there were no exotic songsters. This is not a place of extraordinary remoteness. People live within shouting distance, the land around is farmed with East Anglian intensity and Ipswich is a few minutes away by car.

But here be badgers. Or here be badger holes, anyway. It grew darker, and it became easier to see hallucinatory badgers emerging from the blackness of the holes. But the wait continues, so it is hard to maintain the thrill of anticipation. Instead, you become locked in the present. If they come, they come.

This is not a triumph of spiritual development: it is a revelation of the natural world. The badgers, and the wild world, work to their rules, at their own convenience. If you wait for badgers you must allow the agenda to be set by the badgers themselves. The wild world is in charge now; human convenience has been set aside, and that is a wild feeling.

Let me not boast too much, but I have seen some marvellous things — tiger, bears and humpback whales — in recent months. But equal of any to these wonders is that first badger moment. It’s the nose, that utterly unmistakable nose. It emerges from the hole — pausing, to taste the air — and it is so utterly badger-like, so perfectly itself, that it is almost impossible to believe what you are seeing.

The white face, the black stripes: what a strange fantasy of a creature this is. Even after seeing badgers on a decent number of occasions I still find that first sight of them almost laughably improbable. We most of us grew up with the badgers of fiction: Badger in dressing-gown welcoming Ratty and Moley from the snow; the friend of Rupert Bear; Trufflehunter, who saved the life of Prince Caspian of Narnia.

When you clap eyes on a real one you realise that you’d always secretly believed that badgers were, like dragons, a strange convention of myth-makers and children’s illustrators. That moment when a badger stands before you for real, in all his stripy unlikeliness, is one of the truly great wildlife experiences.

A brief glimpse: a moment to appreciate the immense power of the thing, the strength behind the cuddliness, and the first badger was gone. But that’s wildlife. Undismayed, I ate a sandwich and drank a beer. Give it another ten, then. And on nine, a second badger, a little slimmer, face glowing, caught in the floodlights that come on as the light goes, eating the peanuts that had been left for him, gobbling them up with the urgency of a nervous person at a drinks party. Then departure: not a vintage night of badgering, but a satisfying one for all that.

He — actually I think she, but alas Grimwade was no longer there to clarify such things for me — went about his or her business, and so I went about mine. A long sit for a short treat — but that’s often the way of wildlife. And there would have been an odd satisfaction if I hadn’t seen them at all: knowing that they are there, knowing that I had put myself entirely at their convenience: these things also matter.

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