In January 2016, a conservation biologist named Evan Buechley dragged seven calf carcasses into the Grassy Mountains west of Salt Lake City and staked them to the ground. Each calf weighed about fifty pounds. Each was fitted with a motion-triggered trail camera. Buechley studied vultures and other scavengers. He wanted to see what would come to feed.A week later he hiked back out to check. Six carcasses were still there. One was gone.Not dragged away. Not partially eaten and abandoned. Gone. The stake was gone. The carcass was gone. There was nothing left but disturbed ground where the body had been.Buechley searched the area. He figured a pack of coyotes had pulled the calf off the stake and carried it away. He walked in widening circles looking for drag marks, bones, fur, anything. He found nothing.Then he noticed the dirt. The ground where the calf had been was not just disturbed. It was mounded. The soil had been moved. Not scattered. Piled.He went back to the camera and downloaded the images.What he saw, no scientist had ever documented before.A single American badger, weighing no more than twenty-four pounds, had excavated tunnels underneath the fifty-pound calf carcass over the course of five days. It dug under the body from multiple angles, removing the earth beneath it, until the calf collapsed into the pit the badger had created. Then the badger covered the entire carcass with dirt. Then it built a burrow next to the buried calf. Then it moved in.For eleven days, the trail camera recorded the badger emerging from its burrow, feeding on the buried calf, and returning underground. It had built itself a home next to a refrigerator stocked with fifty pounds of beef, sealed underground where no coyote, no eagle, no vulture, and no other scavenger could reach it.When Buechley reviewed the images, the badger was still there. Sitting on top of the mound. Rolling in the dirt. The biologist later said, “Not to anthropomorphize too much, but he looks like a really, really happy badger, rolling in the dirt and living the high life.”No one had ever seen a badger bury anything larger than a rabbit. The largest previously documented food cache for an American badger was a jackrabbit. This badger had buried an animal more than twice its own body weight, working alone, in the desert, in January. Five days of continuous digging. No help. No breaks. Twenty-four pounds of badger versus fifty pounds of dead cow, and the badger won.And it was not a one-time event. At a separate site in the same study, a second badger had attempted to bury a different calf carcass. It did not finish the job, but it had done enough for the researchers to realize this was not a freak occurrence. This was behavior. Something badgers may have been doing for thousands of years in the deserts of the American West, unseen, because nobody had ever thought to point a camera at the ground.The discovery changed what biologists understood about the role badgers play in desert ecosystems. A single badger that can bury a fifty-pound carcass in five days can remove a major food source from the surface before it attracts predators or spreads disease. Ranchers have traditionally considered badgers pests because they dig holes in rangeland and occasionally kill chickens. But a badger that buries dead cattle before the carcass can attract flies and spread infection to living cattle is performing a service that no rancher asked for and no rancher pays for.American badgers weigh between twenty and twenty-four pounds. They stand about a foot tall at the shoulder. They have five-centimeter claws on their front paws and forelimbs strong enough to dig through blacktop pavement and two-inch concrete. They are built like a shovel with a temper. They live across the western United States and Canada, mostly underground, mostly at night, and most people will never see one.The one in the Grassy Mountains did not know it was being watched. It did not know it was the first of its kind to be recorded doing something that would end up in National Geographic and NPR and a peer-reviewed journal. It just found fifty pounds of dead cow in the desert and decided that the correct response was to put it in the ground, build a house next to it, and eat for two weeks.If there is a more efficient animal in North America, nobody has filmed it yet. Source
This story fits with the Badger Hits The Big Time I posted earlier.