Badger Coloring Pages
A family of badgers can dig an underground town with tunnels, bedrooms and a whole set of front doors. Their long front claws do all the work, and a good sett can stay in use for hundreds of years.
Badgers live in the woods and hedgerows of Europe and come out after dark. You can spot one by the bold stripe over each eye.
Jump to: Where Badgers Live | Earthworms | Fresh Bedding | Cubs | More Printables | About Badgers
Where Badgers Live
Badgers dig wherever the soil is soft enough, in woodland and along hedgerows and the edges of farm fields. Their underground home is called a sett. It has long tunnels, snug rooms for sleeping and several entrances, and a whole family shares it. Each year they dig a few more tunnels, which is how some setts have ended up so old. Badgers sleep underground all day and come out when it gets dark.
Earthworms for Dinner
A hungry badger can gobble a couple of hundred earthworms in one night. On damp evenings the worms wriggle up to the surface, and a badger snuffles through the fallen leaves until its nose finds them. It's not picky though. Beetles, slugs, wasp grubs, acorns and fruit all end up on the menu too.
A Fresh Bed
A badger's bed is a big pile of dry grass and bracken, and it gets changed often. The badger hugs a bundle under its chin and shuffles backwards all the way down into the sett. On sunny days it drags the old bedding back outside to air out.
Badger Cubs
A mother badger usually has two or three cubs at a time. They're born in late winter in a bedroom lined with that soft dry grass, and they can't see for the first month. The cubs stay underground for about two months. When they finally come out in spring they spend the evenings tumbling around the entrance.
More Badger Printables
About Badgers
Badgers are tidier than you'd think. They dig little toilet pits outside the sett so the bedrooms stay clean.
They belong to the weasel family along with otters, pine martens and wolverines. A male badger is called a boar, a female is a sow and a baby is a cub.
Europe's badger has cousins around the world. The American badger is flatter and lives on open prairies, where it digs after ground squirrels. The honey badger lives in Africa and southern Asia and isn't a close relative at all.