[Ed. – This badger even announced its presence with authority. It’s my hero. Exit question: have badgers been doing this all along, and we just didn’t notice? Or are they doing something different at the moment, as an adaptation of some kind — or even, potentially, a preparation?]
University of Utah biologists have caught a badger doing something that scientists have never observed before: burying a meal much bigger than itself.
The university released its finding and a video of the new behavior Friday. It shows the badger working on hiding the food, set to the tune “Yakety Sax,” the Boots Randolf tune famous for its use in funny films and on television.
So, what is the big deal? The new behavior suggests that badgers may have no limit to the size of animal they can store for eating and it may play an important role in what happens to large carcasses. …
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“We didn’t go out to study badgers specifically, but the badger declared itself to us,” he said.
Camera trap records show that the badger completely buried the roughly 50-pound carcass over the course of five days, and then spent around two weeks in his underground burrow before leaving and intermittently returning to the burrow for the next few weeks until early March.
