A special badger – with very special protectors

Despite the whispering, our excitement was palpable. “There’s a white one,” one of the volunteers from the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust said. Not white, as it turned out, although in the half-light of a misty pre-dawn it seemed that way.

Standing closer, the badger appeared more gingery brown, the head’s usual contrast of humbug stripes almost absent. The eyes were a marmalade colour, pretty and rather gentle. This wasn’t an albino but an erythristic badger, lacking black pigment in its fur through a genetic mutation. Their distribution in Britain is patchy; there are more in north Shropshire, for example, but very few in Derbyshire; this was the first badger experts in the county had heard about.

Badgers in humane traps react in all sorts of ways, sometimes hissing or growling; later that morning I’d see one fast asleep. This one remained still, head cocked, waiting to see what would happen next. The head was slim, even a little elongated and the tail somewhat stubby and round, the hallmarks of a female.

Debbie Bailey, taking a career break from nursing to help protect badgers, was busy around the trap, wiggling the fingers of one hand near the badger’s face while the other guided a hypodermic needle towards the badger’s ample rear end, vaccination against tuberculosis. The badger didn’t react as the needle went in but as Debbie clipped fur from the badger’s back, it finally complained. applied a dot of stock spray, so that if this badger were trapped again she would know it.

I could only stand and marvel: at the badger, but also at the dedication of those working on her behalf. It had taken days of patient effort – and lots of peanuts – to treat this badger with the minimum of stress. Procedure complete, Debbie opened the trap and gently coaxed the badger backwards. It paused, tawny snout sniffing the air, and then was off, sprinting in a wide arc round the back of us, bustling through a stand of trees into undergrowth.