By Denis O’Connor

Wharfedale Naturalists Society

IT is tempting to assume that, as darkness falls and we sleep, the wild world sleeps also but in fact the opposite is the case. From dusk onwards animals seldom encountered in daylight emerge to take advantage of the changed conditions.

Over this summer I spent evenings in the countryside north of Otley, visiting badger setts, using information from a naturalist with far more experience than myself of these elusive animals. With long hours of daylight badgers often emerge from their setts before dark. The cubs, born in February and having spent their first few months underground, are then making their first forays outside, engaging in the chasing and rough and tumble common to most young mammals.

However, from late summer on, with the evenings drawing in the badgers no longer need to come out until after dark so on my final few visits I was lucky to get more than glimpses. Recently I decided to change tactics so invested in a trail camera designed to detect body heat and take photos or brief periods of video using infrared light.

My first efforts, in our garden, produced footage of rabbits and a passing fox. I then tried positioning the camera aimed at seeds scattered at the edge of a hedge from which I had occasionally seen a bank vole making brief forays to collect sunflower seeds fallen from the bird feeders. Over a nine hour period I was astonished to record 130 visits of up to three bank voles, their eyes aglow like tiny headlights, emerging to stuff themselves with seeds – whether just three in total or dozens rotating I had no way of knowing.

At a badger sett the camera recorded alternating still shots and videos of badgers coming and going, sandwiched between a tawny owl on the ground before the first badger had emerged and a song thrush as it was getting light and the last badger had retired.

Siting it in a different wood, where a badger track led to a hole in the stone wall round the wood, overnight the camera picked up badgers nine times (one pictured) as well as 70 shots of rabbits and, once it was daylight, a dozen of grey squirrels.

The trail camera screen is tiny but once fed into a computer produces pictures of surprising quality and at a price of £35, not much to pay for opening a window into a world of fascinating night-time activity.

wharfedale-nats.org.uk