FOR YEARS NOW, they have been killing badgers because badgers infect cattle with TB. So it was believed, anyway. Now we learn that all those badger deaths were in vain: because all along, it has been the cattle who have been infecting the badgers.

This information comes in a report published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a leading scientific journal in the United States: so this is not some nutter going off half-cocked. The only conclusion to come to is that it has all been the most colossal waste of time, money and good badger lives.

What is more, the killing of badgers does not wipe out TB in badgers. It actually increases the problem. This is because badgers live set, serious and secure lives in their vast, rambling earthworks. If you disrupt this life with a bit of well-organised death, the badger population is at once in a state of crisis, disruption and movement: so that they will have more contact with infected cattle than usual.

The report is a significant victory for the Badger Trust, which has been fighting an unremitting war against culling, and it is not disposed to minimise its triumph. “These callous vets who have demanded badger killing,” said their spokesman, Trevor Lawson, “ . . . have undermined public confidence in the veterinary profession’s commitment to animal welfare and severely damaged the profession’s scientific integrity.”

Death is always the soft option — at least, it is for those not doing the actual dying. The badger cull is all of a piece with the slaughter of predators that was all the rage in the 19th century and still continues in some places, illegally, today. When in doubt, blame a wild creature; and then kill it. Job done.

But anyone who keeps animals knows in his heart that when things go wrong it is generally not a problem caused by something or somebody else. No, it comes down to your own skills and standards at husbandry.

Bovine TB is spread by the movement of cattle around the country. Badgers, stable and serious when not messed about with, do not gallivant about the countryside. It’s time for the culling to stop.

• AUTUMN: and time to moult into winter plumage of waterproofs and fleeces and woollies. And to celebrate that season’s tumultuous arrival, a daily flypast of geese. One evening, with dramatic suddenness, a double-vee of geese flew over the house, honking, flapping, purposeful: exchanging instructions to keep the formation tight and lend a hand with the hard work up front.

  I watched as the formation broke up, as the leader, the one who bears the brunt of the air pressure, ducked down to let another goose do the hard work at the front — only to have those behind him mimic his slackening speed and his losing of a dozen and more feet: not me, mate, I’m knackered, what about you behind me? They were greylags, as the soft, mellow honking showed: and after the first skein came another, and another.

  They remade the journey the following morning, and back again at night: this time I got the bins on them, and saw among them a farmyard goose — they have been selectively bred from wild greylags over the years — gleaming, white and incongruous in the skein, but flapping hard and honking like a real goose.

  For four or five days the double journeying continued, until it became a matter of quiet routine to glance at the sky and see the glorious line of hurrying birds. And then as suddenly as it began, it stopped. Moved on. Another food source, another roosting place: another mysterious inflection in the mysterious life of the wild that carries on all around us while we do the shopping and pay the mortgage.

• I HAVE SEEN a basking shark only once: a strange, bizarrely enormous shadow just below the surface as I walked the cliffs in Cornwall one spring. They are Britain’s biggest regularly seen creature — they can reach nine metres and seven tonnes — and the Wildlife Trusts reports that its annual survey of these monsters has set a new record.

  They scored very nearly 300 between April and September, and they also saw plenty of courtship. They also found that over the past three years, more and more basking sharks have been seen in northern waters, presumably because of the changing climate. Now hear a fine thing: you can go and look for the sharks yourself, and help with the surveying. E-mail bsholidays@wildlifetrusts.org.

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