Classroom lesson · Wildlife · 🇱🇺 Luxembourg

European Badger

A striped, sociable digger who builds underground cities

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

The European badger is a sturdy, striped animal that lives in Luxembourg's woodlands and hedgerows. Badgers are famous for their bold black-and-white striped faces and their extraordinary skill at digging. They build huge underground home complexes called setts, where whole family groups live together.

Tell me more

A badger sett is like an underground apartment building. It can have dozens of entrances, hundreds of metres of tunnels and many cosy sleeping chambers lined with dry grass and leaves. Some setts are used by the same badger family for hundreds of years, with each new generation adding new tunnels and rooms.

Badgers are nocturnal — they come out mostly at night — and they spend their evenings snuffling about for food with their powerful noses. Their menu includes earthworms (their absolute favourite), beetles, berries, mushrooms and acorns. On a warm, damp night a single badger can eat hundreds of earthworms.

Despite looking a bit grumpy with their striped faces, badgers are gentle and sociable with each other. A family group is called a clan and might have six to fifteen members. They groom each other, play together and work as a team to keep the sett clean.

In Luxembourg you are most likely to find badger setts in old mixed woodland with plenty of earthworm-rich soil nearby. The best way to spot a badger is to sit very quietly in the woods just after sunset and wait — eventually a broad, low, waddling shape will emerge from the darkness.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01A badger sett is used by the same family for hundreds of years. Can you think of human buildings that have been used for hundreds of years?
  2. 02Badgers are nocturnal. What might be the advantages of being active at night rather than during the day?
  3. 03Badgers groom each other and play together. How is a badger clan similar to — and different from — a human family?
Try this

Classroom activity

Draw a cross-section of a badger sett from the side, showing the underground tunnels, sleeping chambers and entrances. Label where the badgers sleep, where the tunnels connect and where the exits come out. Add at least one badger inside the sett.