Badger or Fox?

This evening the garden and valley have been very still, no wind and no wildlife. Evenings like this tend to leave me feeling a bit flat, although, tonight, the absence of wildlife was probably down to me.

Around 6.30pm I had suddenly realised my cat Lizzy was missing. She is 18 yrs old with a thyroid problem and never ventures far from the bungalow these days. The furthest she has been for many months is the veg. patch, so I was very worried. My family and I all separately checked the garage and shed as both had been opened when my husband had mown the lawn earlier. Then we searched the whole garden, front and back, and then the field right up to the woods, calling her name all the time. After about an hour of this I thought I would check the garage again and thankfully there she was waiting at the door to be let out. I was sooo relieved, however, I am guessing that all the calling has put the wind up the creatures that usually venture our way.

I had hoped to see the foxes because I was keen to know if they were responsible for a fairly large deep hole that had been dug in the middle of the lawn and which had a scent mark dropping in it. Later on when I went to fill it in I discovered that it was actually the entrance to a bumble bees nest which either a fox or badger had been trying to get at (needless to say I didn't fill in the hole).

The badgers tend to visit the garden later at night and since our security light has broken it is usually too dark to see them (must get round to buying a new one). There is a strain of albino badger around this part of Biggin Hill and for several years we had one visiting the garden.

Even though I can't see the badgers at the moment I always know when they have visited the garden because of the numorous holes they leave behind but I have never noticed droppings in them before so I am thinking that it was the fox that was after the bumbles.