Nocturnal animals fastest diggers on earth
Did you know that badgers are the fastest digging animals on earth? Their life depends on it. They dig for food, dig their dens and dig to escape predators.
Badgers mainly feed on burrowing rodents, such as pocket gophers and ground squirrels, but they will also eat deer mice, insects, birds, snakes, lizards and carrion. They have to dig faster than their prey in order to capture it.
Since badgers are nocturnal they cannot rely solely on vision to find prey. The badger’s keen sense of smell and hearing allow it to find burrowing rodents. A badger can smell the difference between a burrow of a solitary ground squirrel and a burrow that has a family of ground squirrels.
To capture these rodents, the badger will plug any extra entrances to the rodent’s burrow. Then it will dig its own burrow to intersect the rodent’s burrow near the entrance and wait for the rodent to enter. The badger may also excavate the rodent’s burrow until it finds the rodent.
These techniques and the badger’s fast digging enable it to capture pocket gophers 73 percent of the time. Badgers can quickly deplete a rodent population since adults need at least two ground squirrels or pocket gophers each day to sustain themselves. Active badgers and juveniles will eat more. However, juveniles will eat more insects than rodents until they become adept at digging and catching prey.
During winter or when food is scarce, badgers can survive on less. Badgers will cache food during plentiful times and will gain fat reserves for the winter months.
A badger will spend most of its time in its den during winter. The dens may go nine feet deep and be over thirty feet long. Badgers will dig new dens every few days in the summer, but will stay in the same den all winter long.
To retain heat and keep water out in the winter, the badger will plug the tunnel’s entrance with loose dirt. A badger’s den has an oval entrance that is eight to twelve inches wide and is typically wider than it is tall.
Badger’s reduce their above ground activity by as much as 93 percent during winter, especially if the temperature is below five degrees Fahrenheit. They will stay in their dens for between two to twelve days or for as many as 72 days. To conserve energy during the coldest spells, badgers will enter a state of torpor in which their body temperature drops and their heart beats at half its normal rate.
On warmer winter nights, the badgers will come above ground and seek out hibernating rodents. Their powerful forelimbs and long claws enable them to dig through the frozen ground to the hibernating rodents.
The badger’s massive shoulder and neck muscles enable it to dig faster than a person with a shovel. To escape the few predators they have (which are cougars, wolves, bears and coyotes), they dig to escape. If they cannot escape by digging, they will release a unpleasant musky odor as a warning or snarl, hiss or squeal in aggression.
Scientists originally thought badgers were related to bears but they are actually a member of the weasel family.