If you’ve camped at Bentley Copse and woken up to find a rucksack pocket mysteriously open and a packet of biscuits mysteriously absent, you’ve almost certainly met one of our longest-standing residents. We have at least three badger setts around our perimeter, and by all accounts they’ve been here for as long as anyone can remember — quite possibly longer than the Scouts have.
A thriving badger population is something to be genuinely proud of. Ecologists call badgers an “ecosystem engineer” — their digging turns over and aerates the soil, supporting the plants and invertebrates around it, and old sett tunnels go on to become homes for foxes, rabbits and countless other creatures long after the badgers themselves have moved on. They eat huge quantities of earthworms, beetles and other invertebrates too, keeping those populations naturally in balance.
Across our thirty acres of ancient woodland, that makes our badgers a marker of exactly the kind of stable, healthy habitat we want to be looking after. They’re also a fully protected species under the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, and the national population has been steadily recovering since that protection began. So when you hear rustling outside your tent after dark, you’re in the company of a species that’s been quietly thriving here for generations — and one the law has looked after for over thirty years.
Our badgers are shy by nature and go out of their way to avoid people — they’re not aggressive, and there’s no real safety concern in simply having them around. What they are, however, is opportunistic. Bentley badgers are famously curious and bold when there’s food on offer, and plenty of visitors over the years can vouch for a stash of cream eggs or a pack of bacon vanishing overnight. They will enter tents and open vehicles without a second thought if there’s something worth having inside.
So the handful of precautions we ask every group to follow aren’t really about the badgers at all — they’re about keeping your food exactly where you left it.
Get that right, and a night at Bentley Copse means all the badgers you could hope for — and none of the missing biscuits.
