AS A SKYLARK sings, as a horse runs, so a badger digs. A badger not only digs to pursue its biological destiny, it also digs to express its innermost being. A badger does not jump for joy; it digs. A badger digs holes to live in; a badger also digs holes for the simple, or complex, love of digging.

Fodio ergo sum: for a badger, digging is life. I learnt this when I went badgering this week, in the company of Margaret Grimwade, of the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. And as we visited a series of badger setts, it soon became clear that to describe them as big holes would be like describing York Minster as a largeish shed.

Badgers like their setts dramatic, and so they choose a steepish bank and transform it into a badger palace. The spoil from the holes becomes part of the dramatic transformation: they create great ramparts, platforms, stages of earth. The bank has entrance after entrance, and beneath, tunnel after tunnel interconnecting intricately, or sometimes just on its own, apparently created as a virtuoso exercise in digging.

Badgers love their beds. Obsessively, they bring fresh bedding into the sett and discard old bedding, which adds to the wild clutter all around. As they dig, they find great chunky flints or artefacts long buried: a near-hairless paintbrush, a gas canister. These they heft out and abandon with the other spoil, for they are powerful beasts.

Around one of the principal entrances, you may find a “country seat”: a favourite place for scratching and grooming, worn smooth by immemorial rollings. They dig pits for their dung, which contains all kinds of information to a scent-mad animal such as a badger. And all round, they make paths by their constant travel in search of earthworms and other delicacies. You can see where they have been by the snuffle-holes, conical pits dug out hungrily by conical noses.

Even in daylight, when you have no chance of seeing one, there is never any doubt when badgers are around.

• AS darkness approached, we went to a hide, one designed not to conceal your human shape but your — no offence intended — human smell. Margaret carefully scattered a dole of peanuts. We waited, the sky grew dark, and we waited.

  Joy. Untrammelled joy. A stripy face: so like a badger’s it was almost comical. Warily sniffing before deciding that it was all right to bring out the rest of him, a battered old war veteran this one, the top boar of the clan, with two barely healed sores and no ears, but an unconquerable air about him.

  The animals themselves are more or less conical: a sharp front end, a wide and powerful back-end. It’s a digger’s shape: and the shambling waddle of a gait looks silly until you realise what it is all about. We sat in the hide for a couple of hours, and four badgers emerged to do their stuff — the most elaborate performance given by a comely young sow who was almost svelte, by badger standards.

  You hardy ever see a badger by chance, unless you hit one with a car. You need to sit up past dark in the right place, to be discreet and polite and quite seriously keen on meeting a badger. Then you have the extraordinary pleasure in knowing that such a large, such a truly improbable animal still exists, and does so in pretty good numbers. Badgers, alive and digging it.

• BADGERS are being slaughtered. They are blamed for spreading bovine TB, and killed for it. As a point of information, field voles and brown rats also carry the disease, but it’s impossible to wipe them out, and not much fun, either. So blame the badgers.

  The plain fact of the matter is that the disease spreads because cattle are always being moved about the place. The strong likelihood is that the cattle infect the badgers, not vice versa. But farmers believe that badgers are to blame and badger culling is clear indication that Something is Being Done.

  But it’s the wrong thing: it doesn’t help the farmers, it certainly doesn’t help the badgers, but it makes the farmers, if not the badgers, feel a bit happier. The Mammal Society says there is “insufficient evidence on which to base a bTB control policy”. Any culling policy is based on bad science and bad farming. It is an atavistic response: when in doubt, kill the biggest predator and all will be well. It is not me being sentimental here. It is the other side who are sentimental — sentimental about the need for and efficacy of human control.

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