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THE LIVING WORLD
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MISSED A PROGRAMME?
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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The Living World听is a gentle weekend natural history programme, presented by Lionel Kelleway, which aims to broadcast the best, most intimate encounters with British wildlife.
nhuradio@bbc.co.uk |
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LISTEN AGAIN 听25min |
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PRESENTER |
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"The Living World is the next best thing to being there. Our contributors are skilled naturalists who are able to reveal those fascinating facts about animals and plants that you don't always find in books. It's like having a personal guided tour of the countryside, without needing to leave the house."
Lionel Kelleway
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PROGRAMME DETAILS |
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| Lionel with Dr Chris Newman in Wytham Woods |
Our British badger is unique. The species, the Eurasian badger, has a geographic range that stretches from the UK east to the Japanese islands and from the Arctic Circle down to the Himalayas, but it is only in the UK where these badgers live in groups. Eurasian badgers elsewhere live alone or in pairs, but in Britain they live in much higher densities.听 And with this comes an evolutionary paradox. Most carnivores are solitary, but those that do live together generally display complex co-operative behaviour. British badgers, however, do not collaborate in feeding or in defending their territory. This puzzling social behaviour has intrigued scientists yet so much about badger behaviour remains unknown
The , part of Oxford University鈥檚 Zoology Department, has been studying the badgers in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, since 1973. Over the years they have been able to observe individual badger life-histories and behaviour and have built up possibly the most detailed and complete dataset for any carnivore population in the world.
For The Living World, Lionel Kelleway joins Chris Newman, a Wildcru researcher, in the woods for the biannual 鈥渂ait-marking鈥 session. This involves putting out peanuts covered in syrup (a badger partiality) with some coloured beads mixed in for the badgers to come out and snaffle.
Wytham Woods has the greatest density of badgers ever recorded at 38 adults per square km, and they use 鈥渓atrines鈥 to mark out their territories. By feeding different badger 鈥渃lans鈥 different coloured beads Chris can observe how the territories shift and grow.
The next morning they go in search of coloured droppings to learn more about the badgers鈥 intriguing and intricate social system, which allows so many badgers to live cheek by jowl in the woods.
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