Badger badger badger badger

Look, I'm a child of the early internet, ok? If you don't understand the multiplicity of badgers reference, just pretend I really like the word and keep reading about Meles meles.

I pivoted slightly with this week's post. I have an Underground Kingdom mushroom fact brewing for you, which obviously is very cool and interesting. So much so that it needed more time; this week I have been working on some incredibly exciting projects for the Institute of Regeneration and Repair, which has been the focus of my working week. You'll just have to hang around to learn about mushrooms. You could even subscribe, and get extra mushrooms.

Instead, I took the opportunity to tack badgers on to my mushrooms (and then there should be a snake, right?!) and I don't think I really introduced you all to this print, so here we go.

I am fascinated with ecology. Where we all fit and how we fit there is, I think, something that interests a lot of humans, in one interpretation or another. I like the ecology variation, because it's not just about us. I wanted to start a print series looking at how animals might live near me, so I created a wee riso series which includes Back & Forth, a bumblebee, an octopus, an anemone and this badger, living in Princes Gardens, underneath Edinburgh Castle. Are there badgers living there? I have never seen any, and I would doubt it because I think they quite like their privacy and the gardens are pretty busy with people and trains and cars and stuff, but there are definitely badgers within the city because I have seen them so theoretically, they could live there happily. That was the thinking behind most of these prints: a slightly halfhearted “let's kind of ignore human interference for a second”.

I like a badger. I like the way they move, it’s very fluid, those front paws are chunky and great for digging up food (and getting into hedgehogs - you know they eat them, right?!) and they can be downright vicious when they need to be (I had a dog who plucked one out of its sett once and the dog never did that again). They also have excellent taste, from eating several hundred earthworms of an evening to that glorious black and white stripe, let’s just take a moment to appreciate the humble badger.

And if you really like him you should probably put him on your wall - I have the answer.

Come back next week for mushrooms and let me know if I should do more on ecology? I’ll add it to the list, alongside that taxonomy series that none of you asked for but I am now working on furiously.