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How to identify badgers
The UK’s only species of badger, the European or Eurasian badger (Meles meles), is also spotted in Europe and the Middle East. A member of the mustelid family, badgers are mighty mammals. Badger males (boars), females (sows) and cubs are iconic in their appearance, their behaviour and their community – all of which makes them easy to identify. Here’s what to look out for:
Physical features
Colour
Badgers are best known by their signature racing stripes; their black and white striped heads, and black ears with white tips. The rest of their body is typically a mixture of dark grey and white-tipped fur, making them appear grey, with a lighter underbelly, and black legs and chest. Some badgers may look brown on their back, and older badgers may have yellow-stained fur around their underbelly from their subcaudal scent gland (by their bums!).
Certain badger conditions can affect colouring. Albino badgers have creamy white fur and pink or red eyes due to a lack of melanin, and the erythristic badger has a genetic mutation causing them to have ginger or reddish-brown fur.
Boars (male) and sows (female) are identical in appearance, but badger cubs are born pink, with very faint, pale stripes that are barely visible until their silver-grey fur begins to grow, appearing after a few days.
Body
Badgers have short, extremely muscular limbs with strong, non-retractable claws on their broad feet. These are adaptations that help them dig and spend long periods below ground in their setts. They can also climb fairly well – up tree trunks and netting – and swim.
Badgers are different weights throughout their lifetimes, depending on their age, the time of year, where they live and the availability of food. On average, they weigh between 8kg and 12kg. However, they’re heaviest at the end of autumn, when they’ve built up fat reserves to help them through the winter.
Badgers can grow up to a metre in length, though on average they’re between 75cm and 100cm, with a tail length of 15cm. Their loose skin makes it difficult for predators or rival badgers to grip onto them.
Senses
Badgers have small, black eyes. These make them less susceptible to injury, irritation and damage when underground – but mean they have poor eyesight, especially in daylight.
They have an incredible sense of smell, which is vital to communication. Their scent glands distribute information through different odours – via squat marking (where they lower their bottom and lift their tail) and allo-marking (where they mark each other) – such as for mating or in warning. These scents also strengthen relationships within badger clans. Badger poop (scat) contains many of their scents, and they also have scent glands between their toes; both used to mark territory.
Did you know?
The average lifespan of a badger is 5 to 8 years
Where and when you might see badgers
Where
You may spot a badger in the wild all year round in most parts of Britain – especially in southwest England – although some islands and northern parts of Scotland don’t have any.
Badgers’ habitats have evolved over the years. They prefer to settle down within broad-leaved and mixed woodland, copses and areas of soil where they can easily dig their setts, as well as open countryside. However, as more built-up areas arise, they’ve also begun to live closer to people-populated places.
So, you may spot badgers rummaging through your garden as they search for food, or move between sett locations. You’ll occasionally even find them in places like golf courses and cemeteries.
When
Badgers don’t hibernate, but spend more time beneath ground during December and January, where they can enter their inactive state known as ‘torpor’ – conserving energy by lowering body temperature, heart rate and metabolic functions to survive the winter.
As nocturnal and crepuscular (most active at dusk and dawn) creatures, the best time to see a badger is in warmer weather at night. As the nights are shorter in the summer, badgers have to begin foraging while it’s still light enough to spot them, so this is a good time of year to try badger-watching.
Caution
Badgers are incredibly inquisitive and fascinating animals, but they can be dangerous if approached. While much more likely to run away, they can attack if they feel threatened or vulnerable – and they have a nasty bite! Make sure you watch badgers from a distance, giving them the space to move freely and undisturbed.
Badger setts
On the surface, a badger sett looks like a hole in the ground, often with spoil heaps (piles of soil) around the opening. But below ground, a badger sett is an impressive network of chambers and tunnels that up to eight badgers will call home.
Some have a single entrance and other, bigger, older setts have multiple entrances (as many as 50!) which are oval to accommodate the shape of the badger, leading to a complex structure that can be as long as 20m to 100m. There’s often the ‘main’ sett, where the badgers will spend the majority of their time and raise their cubs, and an ‘outlier’ sett, used for sanctuary when out foraging. The well-worn path of a badger’s regular route is called a pad.
These underground architects are also clean creatures – they keep their setts tidy, and their bedding fresh. They fill the chambers where they sleep with bedding materials like dry grass, moss, leaves and hay for warmth and insulation, and to protect cubs. Badgers also build their own toilets. They dig shallow pits at the edge of their setts, depositing their droppings (scat), to strengthen social bonds through scent. These communal areas are known as latrines.
The labyrinth-like layout of a sett can take years to build, and often belong to many generations of badgers within the same social group – some are more than a century old!
did you know?
Badger setts are also important for the ecosystem, becoming a habitat for other wildlife, such as invertebrates, plants, small mammals, and amphibians.
Elder trees often grow near badger setts, from seeds dispersed in their droppings. This process makes badgers natural rewilders, helping to restore natural landscapes.
Spotted a sick or injured badger?
From unlawful badger baiting to traffic accidents, badgers and their cubs are commonly injured or even killed by human activities. If you find a sick, injured or dead badger, learn how you can help.
Badger behaviour
Badgers, like people, are complex, curious and playful creatures who
showcase many different behaviours – from their diets to their social
structure – all of which help us better understand, and even relate to them.
Badger diet
Badgers are technically carnivores, though they consume an omnivorous diet – so what do badgers eat?
Badgers mainly live off earthworms, but if these are thin on the ground due to harsh weather or barren areas of habitat, they’re more than willing to eat whatever they can find. This can include other invertebrates like beetles, bees and wasps, snails and slugs, rodents like mice and voles, rabbits, fruits like blackberries and raspberries, and nuts, bulbs, cereals and carrion (dead animal remains).
If they’re having a hard time finding their usual food (especially in hot and dry weather), they may even resort to eating hedgehogs (who they usually coexist happily alongside).
The emotional and social lives of badgers
Badgers are known for their big, playful personalities. They have designated ‘play areas’ around their setts for cubs to play fight and adult badgers to gather. This strengthens their connections and prepares them for fights with badgers from rival clans.
Like us, badgers also bond with one another through their actions. They groom each other or press their bottoms against another badger to leave their scent (okay, not exactly like us).
A group of badgers in the UK is called a clan (or sometimes a cete). These social groups typically consist of between five to 12 badgers, including a mix of boars and sows, younger badgers and cubs.
Even though badgers live in groups, they often act individually. While many species work cooperatively within their social groups when foraging for food, badgers search for food as individuals.
They do, however, work together to defend their territory, which often contains more than one sett (with four to eight badgers per sett). Badgers are highly territorial and often have fierce battles with other social groups for territory. They’re even more territorial during mating season.
But the social lives of badgers aren’t as black and white as you might think. Rabbits, wood mice, pine martens, voles and red foxes all coexist alongside them, seeing their setts as sanctuaries.
Badger cubs play games like tag
Chasing each other around tree trunks and in and out of holes – and ‘king-of-the-castle’ – with one cub occupying higher ground and the others trying to claim it.
¹Abundance of badgers (Meles meles) in England and Wales 2017.
Badger breeding
Badgers usually mate with another badger from their clan, but in late winter or early spring, badgers of either sex can visit neighbouring social groups in search of potential mates.
The male badger will pursue the female by biting the nape of her neck (a love bite!).
Badgers mate throughout the year, and female badgers can mate multiple times over many months. However, it’s more common between January and May, and July and August, the periods when sows are most fertile. No matter the time of year badgers breed, fertilised eggs don't develop until winter – this is called delayed implantation.
Female badgers don’t have offspring until they’re two or three years old, and can only have one litter a year.
Another reproduction process, called superfetation, enables badgers to have a larger quantity of cubs. It means that sows can mate again after already successfully mating, producing a litter of cubs who belong to several males all in one pregnancy.
Superfetation also prevents the risk of male badgers killing cubs, because they believe all the cubs to be theirs.
Badger cubs
Badgers have cubs as early as mid-December or as late as April, but most are born between January and March – the peak season being early February. Their gestation period is technically only six to eight weeks, however, due to delayed implantation, the female may have become pregnant as early as 11 months before giving birth.
Cubs are born in the sett chambers where badgers sleep, kept warm by bedding materials. Litter sizes range from one to five cubs, with two or three as the average. Newborns are thin and about 12cm, weighing only 75 grams to 130 grams, and are born with faint, barely visible stripes on their faces – these appear after a few days as fur grows.
Despite being nocturnal animals, if food is scarce, cubs can sometimes be spotted foraging above ground in the summer daylight.
If you think you’ve found a sick, injured or abandoned badger cub, find out how to help.
Badger cub growth timeline
- Cubs develop their first teeth at four weeks old.
- At five weeks, they open their eyes for the first time.
- At around six weeks old, cubs start exploring their sett tunnels.
- They stay below ground for the first eight to 10 weeks (and occasionally pop their head out of sett entrances at eight weeks), only emerging from late April when the spring weather brings more food, but keeping close to their mums.
- Weaning starts at 12 weeks old. Most cubs are fully weaned by May, and almost all of them by July.
- At 16 weeks, cubs will behave much like the adult badgers in their clan; grooming and scent marking one another.
- They’re fully mature by the age of one.
Badgers have a particularly lovely relationship with elder trees; you often see these trees near badger setts, growing from the seeds dispersed in their droppings. This process makes badgers natural rewilders, helping to restore natural landscapes long before us.
Badgers and the law
After suffering years of cruelty, badgers are now a protected species. Despite this, many are still killed in traffic accidents and through illegal acts. Find out more about the laws preventing the mistreatment of badgers.
How the RSPCA helps badgers
Between 2021 and 2025, we admitted over 350 badgers into our wildlife centres. We also regularly campaign on their behalf.
In past years, we’ve successfully campaigned for better badger protection, and continue to help enforce the law by assisting with police investigations or prosecuting people involved in wildlife crimes such as badger digging and badger baiting. Undercover RSPCA inspectors have helped bring a number of successful badger digging cases before the courts.
We’re also working to inform and improve the UK Government’s Bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) management policy. Read more about bTB here.
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