Badgers About The House

For over 45 years photographer Laurie Campbell has used fieldcraft to get close to badgers in many habitats, including his own home!

- Anna Levin

We’re taking a shortcut through darkening woods to the still-shining river, wading down through wild garlic, which scents the evening air. Being out and about with wildlife photographer Laurie Campbell involves taking the road less travelled. He doesn’t rush from A to B: you’d miss too much along the way. He stops suddenly to pick up a badger hair – it’s coarse, with a black band and white tip – and crouches to study the prints in the soft mud. There’s a wide pad and a straight row of five forward-facing toes… definitely badger.

Laurie has known and watched badgers here since childhood. It feels like he can sense their presence, he’s so alert to signs that most of us would stride past. As a schoolboy he would set out alone from his home in Berwick-upon-Tweed, following the river for miles, exploring and observing. One evening he discovered a badger sett on a wooded slope above the river and was drawn to a sense of the wild so close to home.

Here were large, wild mammals going about their bustling lives, yet hidden from most of the people around who wouldn’t have walked so far, nor waited so long to see them. Already a keen photographer, Laurie decided to watch the sett intensively and find ways to document what he observed. And so a lifelong adventure in badger watching began.

The first step was to get above them – a tip he had gleaned from studying David Stephen’s seminal A Guide to WatchingWild Life, published in the 1960s. “It was like a Bible for me,” says Laurie. He would arrive before sunset and lie silently along a branch of a large elm, later building and waterproofing a small hide in the tree. “A real adventure den up a tree!” recalls Laurie. “It was exciting to be on my own in places I’d never been with my family – in the wild.”