A conservation biologist who studies animal behaviors at night was shocked when a corpse of a cow he placed on the site disappeared leaving no trace of evidence. However, the camera shows an amazing badger act that explains the mysterious disappearance of the carcass.
In the article published by NPR.org, Evan Buechley, who published the study on the new behavior March 31 in the Western North American Naturalist with three colleagues from the University of Utah, placed seven cows in Utah's Great Basin Desert for a research and put hidden cameras in the area. The team aims to study the behavior of animals, including badgers, during at night in Utah's desert. But a week later, Buechley returned to the site and found one of the cow carcasses disappeared with no trace.
"My first reaction was to be fairly disappointed. It takes a lot of effort to bring a 50-pound cow carcass through the desert," Buechley explained. But after a short search, he noticed that the ground was disturbed wondering to the idea that an animal like a badger or coyote could have dragged it.
Buechley was really surprised after reviewing the camera that a badger was digging into the ground for five days trying to bury a cow about four times the badger's weight. What he saw, no one had ever seen it before.
According to The National Geographic, the photos reveal that over the course of five days, a single American badger excavated tunnels beneath the calf carcass until the thing collapsed into it. The badger then cover the cow completely and constructed a burrow beside it, feasting on the cow underground for 11 straight days. And the fact that it able to handle an animal much bigger than its size surprises scientists.
Badgers are short-legged nocturnal omnivores and are known to be the "master tunnelers" which catches and buries smaller prey like rabbits. They live in extensive burrows solitarily but some form clans from two to five.
"I was really shocked by the fact that these badgers could completely monopolize and dominate that food source," Evan Buechley said. He added that the discovery may be an interesting niche and it may be, badgers plays and key role in the nutrient cycle than anybody would know.
Badgers are known to be good at digging and had been known to hide their food underground. But a later investigation into the scientific literature revealed that no one ever recorded a badger entomb anything larger than a jackrabbit. Buechley said he became more and more amazed at this kind of impossible trait that this badger had achieved.
