The cliff exploration is continuing and we are putting cameras in various locations to try to identify the badger sett.

In fact, we think we have now found the main sett entrance and have a camera on it. Should there be baby badgers emerging in April, this year we will see them.

The camera is set on video only and WordPress doesn’t support videos and so I have done screen grabs from videos which are grainier than I would like.

We have been enjoying intimate glimpses of the badgers’ private life as they hang around at the entrance of the tunnel, scratching and grooming each other. As far as we can tell, there are only two of them:

The cameras show that a local cat likes to hang out in this area and when we went to collect the cameras today, there was a sorry pile of soft little grey feathers. Cat kills by overfed pet moggies are so unnecessary and unfortunate and make me angry.

Was the victim the little robin who we have seen hopping about the area every day on film, or this thrush who just this very morning we videoed banging a snail against a stone just at the sett entrance?

When we got the cameras back and looked at the images – we realised that we had got it all wrong:

As I say, the screen grab is grainy but what we had on this video is a Sparrowhawk on top of the thrush who at this point was still alive.

Horrible, but also rather wonderful and so much better than it being pointlessly killed by a cat just for the heck of it.

As we walked around the meadows a couple of hours later, we found the conclusion to this little story in the hedgerow about half way up the meadow, 50 metres away from the kill site.