As I walked down the river bank, there was a steady breeze at my back. This meant that I could not watch the badger sett from my usual position across the valley, as the wind would blow my scent directly to the badgers, so I made my way past the mouth of the valley, up the bluff and came to the edge of the wood just above the sett.

The wind blew steadily into my face, so I stood with my back to a tree just a few yards from the nearest hole and started looking around with my binoculars for the tawny owls which I knew would be roosting somewhere not far away.

After a while, I noticed a movement in the field across the valley. Through the binoculars, I could see that there was a grey-haired man, a young woman and three little girls. As they came across the field, I realized that Grandad was taking his daughter and grandchildren badger-watching!

I watched as they came to the edge of the wood and made their way along the barbed wire fence where the ground dropped into the valley, and then my eye caught a movement in the hole just in front of me. A fully grown badger came out of the hole and gazed across at Grandad and company, jerking his head upwards as he sniffed the breeze. He then immediately turned and went back down the hole.

When they came directly opposite me, the little girls put a cloth on the ground to sit on, but then skipped around excitedly while Grandad pointed out the holes to his daughter, and probably explained where the badgers might come from. I had no hope of seeing anything of interest now, but I did not want them to see me, so I stayed, watching the badger-watchers and scanning the trees for the tawny owls. Ten minutes later, a white muzzle appeared at the hole just four yards from me, tested the breeze, and disappeared again.

When it was nearly dark, I slipped away quietly. Grandad had made three badger-watching mistakes. He should have arrived at least ten minutes earlier to ensure that he was in position before the badgers came up. He should have made sure that he was downwind, and he should not have stayed on the skyline – badgers do not recognize shape very well, but they have excellent vision as far as movement is concerned, and it is too much to expect little children to stay still for very long.

It was nearly dark as I returned along the river bank past the mouth of the valley. A slender arc of moon hung over the wood, and the tawny owls hooted to each other. The little girls would not see any badgers, but they would remember this evening, sitting on the edge of the dark wood, listening to all the night noises of a place which had become magical with the passing of dusk.

Went back to the sett across the river, with weather overcast and no wind, making it difficult to decide where to sit to make sure that my scent was not carried towards the sett. As I climbed the bank at the mouth of the valley, I disturbed a pair of tawny owls who flew off around the corner to the wood lining the bluff overlooking the river.

I settled down at about 7.50 p.m. in reasonable light, as I expected them to be up ten minutes earlier than last time – about 8 o’clock. However, the light worsened with no action from the sett, until in very dim light at 8.20, I spotted a badger coming down the bank from the group of holes at the top. Rats! I didn’t see which one he came from, but it definitely wasn’t the one they all used last week.

A few minutes later, a second came down from the same direction, joining the first one in a hole with plenty of freshly excavated soil in front of it.

This was annoying – from last week’s visit, I thought I knew the hole at which I could expect cubs shortly, and now I didn’t. Even worse – a light wind came, and was blowing my scent directly towards the hole they had gone down. After a while, one of them came up, sniffed the air worriedly, and hastened back up the slope and under the barbed wire into the field. So – they are using the hole out in the field!

Eventually, when I was about to leave at 8.35 p.m., up came a badger from the hole I saw them from last week, followed shortly by a second. I could just make them out with my binoculars as they scratched themselves and groomed each other. I then left, feeling confident that I will see cubs emerge from that hole before long.

As I walked back along the river bank, tawny owls were hooting and kee-wicking from several directions. When I go into the wood next time, I must try to spot them in the trees before I get close enough to scare them into flight and see if I can get some video footage of them.

We were late, so we drove the car down the track to the river and parked next to the swing bridge. As we walked along the riverbank, two pairs of mallard ducks were squabbling on the water, no doubt feeling spring territorial urges.

The wood containing the badger sett filled a small valley leading down to the river between farm fields on either side. We crossed the stream flowing down the valley where it opened out into the river’s water meadow, and climbed the opposite bank. A short distance up the valley, and we were in position opposite the sett, with the light rapidly failing. Fortunately, we both had binoculars, so when the boar badger emerged at 8.10 p.m. in quite murky light, we could both see him easily.

He was very cautious and took a few minutes to settle down for a scratch on the mound of earth outside the hole, and after a while was joined by a second badger, probably a female. They groomed each other and scratched sociably, before the male wandered off down the bank. While he was scouting for food along the bottom of the valley, a third badger emerged to join the other one still on the mound outside the hole. They also groomed each other and scratched, but went back down the hole after a while.

By this time, it was very dark and difficult to see more, so we left. I expect that there are cubs in the sett, mothered by the second badger up, and hope to see them above ground in 3-4 weeks time.

I had a headache, probably due to worries about family and work, so I took Ben’s lead down, causing the usual yelping excitement, put on a warm jacket and set off down the track to the river.

As I crossed the swing bridge, gulls were swooping for titbits from the fishermen huddled on the bank at the regular intervals laid down by the angling association. I walked along the western river bank until we came to the stile, then cut across the big water-meadow and climbed the bluff overlooking the river.

Typically of the landscape in Cheshire, the farm fields bordered with hawthorn hedges now spread before me, all much at the same level. I climbed over the barbed wire fence and crossed the field towards the wood as the sun lingered just above the horizon. Ben caught me up, having found his own way through the fence, and we stopped at the edge of the wood, looking at the badger sett.

As I expected, there were no badgers in sight – they would not be about their nocturnal business for another two or three hours – but it was worth standing quietly for a few minutes because of the possibility of seeing an early-rising fox which had taken lodgings in the sett. However, all was quiet, apart from a raucous call from a moorhen down in the valley and the lowing of cattle a few fields away.

I entered the wood and looked carefully at the holes along the top edge of the incline. They were full of newly fallen leaves, and there was little sign of activity, so I moved down the bank to the other string of holes. There were recent scratches on the sloping path, and the mounds outside the lower holes were topped with newly disturbed earth containing badgers’ footprints. The hole at the extreme end of the sett, from which I had seen a sow badger emerge with her family of three cubs last spring, seemed particularly well used, and the earth around the adjacent tree trunk where the family had sat and scratched and groomed each other was well packed down and clear of leaves.

Ben and I made our way down to the mouth of the valley, crossed the water meadow and walked back along the river bank. The fishermen had gone, one of their stations on the opposite bank being now occupied by a heron, who was quite happy to stand there hunched up until I stopped to look at him. He nervously fidgeted for a bit and then flew off upstream.

Walking up the track in the dim light, I worked up a sweat inside the lined oilskin jacket as usual, but when I got home and put the key in the door, my headache had gone. Wonderful how a simple contact with Life beyond our own immediate concerns can restore body and mind.

The palm tree was not the sort that you find on tropical beaches. It had no trunk to speak of, so its crown was only about eight feet high, while its lower branches hung outwards just a few feet above the ground. Its squat relations were crouched in the grassland leading down to the lagoon at regular intervals, black mounds dotted among the grass gleaming grey in the moonlight.

Kofi and I quietly approached, and saw the snake that was lying across one of the horizontal branches, apparently asleep and certainly quite unaware of our presence. I got the net out, and we prepared to throw it over the snake, but I was apprehensive about the operation because I could not tell what sort of snake it was in the dim light, and Kofi operated on the sensible assumption that any snake is dangerous, and was therefore more nervous than I was.

Eventually, we screwed up our courage and dragged the net across the branch outwards so that the snake fell to the ground enmeshed in its folds. It immediately started thrashing about while I tried to wrap up the net and get it into the bag that Kofi was holding open. One end of the snake, draped in white netting, wiggled before me, but was it the head or the tail? If I grabbed the tail, the snake would know where to bite its assailant, and I hesitated for an instant, after which the net was suddenly empty.

We searched for our prey in the short grass but it had disappeared, and we resumed our wander across the savannah, silver-grey in moonshine. I was disappointed that we had not succeeded in catching the snake, but my disappointment was mingled with relief that we had survived our foolhardiness unscathed …….

One evening, a few days after I came to live in Cheshire in the early 1970s, I was explaining to a stocky bearded Welshman from Anglesey to whom I had just been introduced in the bar of the Verdin Arms, how I missed the African wildlife. 

“It’s a bit of a wrench coming back to this country, Francis, when we had geckos patrolling the ceiling, terrapins in the muddy pool just outside the front gate, puff adders in the ditch beside the road to the school, and an annual deer festival where the local people went out at dawn to catch deer with their bare hands” I moaned. “There’s nothing here but houses, roads and fields”. I spoke as someone who had lived in towns and lived a quite blinkered life as far as wildlife was concerned before moving with my young family to Ghana for three years.

Francis nodded in agreement at my grossly exaggerated description of the plentitude of wildlife on the edge of a small African town, and then diffidently said “Mind you, I went with a chap to watch badgers a couple of years ago.” My interest engaged immediately, I cross-questioned him about it, and extracted a promise that he would take me to the wood in question the following weekend.

And so, a few days later, the two of us sat in a wood just outside town on an early Spring evening, beside several holes in a bank with great mounds of earth forming a sort of stage before them. In Africa, I had learned the pleasure of listening and watching the rest of Life getting on with its business. As we sat there with the light fading, the birds singing their songs and listening to other strange sounds of woodland life, I realized that the same pleasure was available in this country as well. There, with everything around me novel and interesting, I had looked at the world with eyes which were open to what they were seeing, after living for years in Britain in a world which seemed familiar, undramatic and unsurprising.

No badgers appeared. As we made our way back to the car, Francis was apologetic, insisting that he really had seen badgers emerge from that sett a couple of years ago. Elated by the experience and contemplation of an English wood at dusk, I would have none of his apology. We discussed why they had not come up, surmised that they might have heard us coming, that perhaps the alarm calls of birds put them off, and arranged to try again the following weekend.

In fact, we tried again for several weekends, saw no badgers on each occasion, and eventually came to the conclusion that the sett was empty.