A beautiful sunny evening, but cold. I parked the car and climbed the stile into the field, watched by a herd of cattle munching grass the other side of an electrified wire. As I walked across the fields, the wind was at my back, which was not ideal, as I would have to be on the side of the sett that the badgers tended to roam around.

Double Wood is in a wide, thickly wooded valley, and it is impossible to see the badger sett from the opposite side, so I had to get up close. I followed the path as it dropped down into the wood, and crossed the small stream at the bottom. The sett was at the top of the slope in front of me, a little way down the valley, so I climbed up, noting a dung pit containing fresh excrement on the way. When I reached the barbed wire fence at the top, I walked slowly along the edge until I came to the sett.

The main hole from which I had seen the whole family emerge last year was much the same, but just inside the barbed wire were two holes which had been dug with spades and then filled in – the sett had been attacked by badger-diggers since the last time I was there. I sat down opposite the main hole with a feeling of sadness and anger, and thought about the video sequences that I had on tape, showing the adults and the cubs grooming each other on the mound of earth outside the hole now in front of me.

There were certainly survivors in the sett, as the fresh dung showed, and the spade-dug holes had obviously been dug a considerable time ago. However, as I sat listening to the bird song and watching the shifting light beams as the sun sank beyond the trees on the other side of the valley, no badgers emerged. At 8.30, I was convinced that they should have come up if they were there, so I moved off down the valley a short distance to where I could watch some other holes which the Double Wood family often used.

Five minutes later, I looked back where I had been and glimpsed a black and white shape running back towards the main hole. Damn! The badger must have come up soon after I moved, and happened to come across the spot where I had been sitting.

I stayed another twenty minutes, but with no real hope of seeing badgers which were now alerted to my presence. As I walked back across the darkening fields, shadowy rabbits scuttled into the hedgerows before me, and I shivered in the cold night air.