A sett can look deserted at midday and busy again by dusk. Badgers spend most of the day underground, so waiting in front of a hole for something to appear rarely answers the question. The ground around the entrance does. Soil, droppings, worn runs and small traces of digging build up over weeks, and read together they tell you whether a sett is in use — no torch needed, and no badger disturbed.
A badger hole is broader than it is tall: a flattened arch, usually 25–30 cm across, with a rounded roof and a floor worn smooth by years of comings and goings. The tunnel tends to rise slightly as it goes in, which helps keep the chamber at the far end dry. Stand a metre or two back with a torch and you can often see whether the walls are smoothed and rounded or rough and crumbling.
Foxes sometimes take over a corner of an old sett, so finding a fox at one hole does not mean the badgers have gone. Check the others.
When badgers extend a tunnel or clear one out, they push the excavated soil out of the entrance, where it settles into a fan-shaped heap. Fresh spoil is loose and crumbly, usually darker than the surrounding topsoil, with nothing growing on it.
A wet night is your friend. Rain settles the surface and sharpens any prints left after dark, so an early visit the morning after heavy rain is the best time to read a spoil heap.
Several fresh heaps across a sett are far stronger evidence than one, and a heap that changes shape between visits is about as good as proof gets.
Badgers dig shallow pits — usually 15–20 cm across — and use the same ones repeatedly. Latrines tend to sit near the sett, along well-used paths and at the edges of a territory, and you will often find several deposits in one small patch rather than scattered about.
Badger droppings are dark and roughly cylindrical, sometimes coiled or broken into segments, and their texture follows the diet: visible seeds, berry pips and insect fragments are common. Age is easy to read from colour. Fresh droppings are dark and glossy; older ones dry to grey or pale brown and eventually crumble away. A pit holding both is a site in regular use.
Do not handle them. Droppings and damp soil can carry disease, so look from a distance rather than poking about, and wash your hands properly afterwards. If you feel unwell after a day in the field, mention the contact to a GP.
Badgers are creatures of habit and follow the same routes night after night. The result is a web of low, narrow runs through the grass, typically 20–30 cm wide, threading between entrances, latrines and feeding areas. Badgers push through vegetation rather than over it, so the runs stay low, with the grass along them cropped short or worn back to bare soil.
Look for scratching posts too: tree trunks near the sett, scored with vertical claw marks, sometimes smoothed and darkened with use. And check the ground outside the holes for bedding. Badgers gather dry grass, bracken, straw and leaves, and you can sometimes spot a clear drag line of vegetation leading into an entrance.
Not every entrance in a sett is in use. A large sett might have a dozen holes with only two or three being worked at any one time. Signs that a particular hole has been left alone for a while:
None of that means the whole sett is empty. Badgers shift between holes, extend setts in autumn and use different parts of a site through the year. If you are unsure, visit twice, a fortnight apart, and compare what you find.
Watch from a distance and let the badgers come to you. A quiet hour at dusk, seated well back with binoculars, tells you more than any amount of peering into holes. Keep dogs on a lead, never block, widen or dig an entrance, and try not to trample the spoil heaps you came to read. Note the grid reference, the number of holes, which ones show fresh signs, and the date.
Badgers and their setts are protected by law across the UK. Damaging, destroying or obstructing a sett is an offence, and so is disturbing the badgers using one; work that affects a sett normally needs a licence. If you are planning anything that might touch a sett — fencing, tree work, drainage, building — speak to your local wildlife trust or the relevant conservation body before you start. That is general guidance rather than legal advice, but the principle is simple: look, record, leave it alone.
Count the active holes rather than the holes themselves, and come back in a fortnight. Two visits tell a far better story than one, and the sett will keep giving you more to read each time.
Photo: Anilsharma26 / Pixabay
