Dark Skies_A Journey Into the Wild Night by Tiffany Francis-Baker

Author:Tiffany Francis-Baker [Francis-Baker, Tiffany]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472964571
Amazon: B07S17ZWT8
Publisher: Bloomsbury Wildlife
Published: 2019-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Wickerman

Early May, the dusk was falling and the air around me was pregnant with the aroma of blackthorn flowers that had twisted themselves deep into the hedgerow. I had come back to Butser Ancient Farm, as I did every May, and I was now mildly inebriated, cradling a large pint of cider while I stood beneath a 9-metre wickerman looming into the sky. He stared, mighty and cantankerous across the gloaming, his thick limbs made of hazel hurdles lashed together, with red cedar shingles laid out in rows to form chainmail over his chest. Propped against his arm was a black axe that, the week before, I had painted with a serpentine pattern that was once excavated from some artefact in a Danish tomb.

Behind it all, the dwindling light cast shadows on the forest that bordered the land, home to a nest of buzzards and their mewing young. Between the trees lay a carpet of wild garlic that had begun to unfurl its creamy-white flowers, their aromatic presence floating out of the woods, heralding spring. When we walked in those trees at night, the darkness settled on everything but the flowers and they seemed to glow like stars, a reflection of the sky above the canopy. Once I set my trail camera to film the entrance to the woods, intrigued by what might emerge from the trees. I knew there were badgers and foxes that made their home there, badger setts composed of interlocking tunnels and nesting chambers that might have been passed down over centuries, all hidden away beneath our feet. I caught nothing for days, and then, one blustery night in the early hours, a badger appeared from the gloom – a huge, lumbering beast of a creature with a glint in each eye. He stopped, sniffed at the air, his head turning in every direction until he thought it safe to proceed. Out he trotted, away from the cover of the trees, and stopped again. Sniffed. Ears twitched. Sniffed. Flinched. Startled. Retreat! Back he trotted, into the woods, enveloped by grainy darkness on my computer screen.

There are around 290,000 badgers in Britain, which seems like a lot until you hear that 45,000 are killed on our roads every year. In the 1970s, wildlife protection groups lobbied parliament to make it an offence to attempt to kill, take or injure badgers or to interfere with their setts without a licence. These laws are now contained in the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. Despite this, for the last few decades a number of reactive and proactive badger culls have been launched as part of government initiatives to reduce the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB), a highly infectious disease that devastates thousands of beef and dairy farms every year. In 2003, a series of independent trials revealed that reactive culling, in which badgers were culled in the areas where bTB was already present in cattle, actually resulted in a 27 per cent increase in bTB outbreaks compared to those areas where no culling took place.

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