Avoiding the Badger Mafia.

We had quite heavy rain last night and rain has a disastrous effect on my bird tables. The contents, being a mixture of rolled oats and mixed seeds, turn into a cold, wet, gloopy substance which I like to refer to grandly as ‘fortified porridge.’ But the birds don’t like it. I see them looking disconcerted when I open the curtains in the morning, and the robins – being the most knowing of birds – eye me with a look which clearly indicates a measure of avian discontent. So I have to scrape it all off and replace it with fresh, dry stuff, and then the little feathered friends flock eagerly to the table again and all is right with the world. (They never fly to me and tweet a word of thanks, but sometimes you just have to accept that good deeds are their own reward.)

So what do I do with the scraped off stuff? Do I throw it away, thereby sticking hot needles into my extreme sense of disquiet at wasting perfectly good food? Nope; I deposit as much as I can manage in a polythene bag and tip it out close to a nearby badger sett. Badgers seem to be quite partial to cold, wet gloopy stuff. I came across one feasting on it in my garden a few winters ago, so I should know. And my question is this:

How smart are badgers? Might they have come to recognise that heavy rain is the precursor to a free supper of fortified porridge? And if I fail in my now time-honoured practice, will they take the hump and come a-stalking to punish me for my oversight? Badgers are the heaviest, strongest and toughest of the carnivorous mammals we have in Britain, so getting on the wrong side of a whole family of them probably isn’t a good idea.