The people in Villa Park put up with the strange animal in their toolshed for about as long as they could. They didn’t know exactly what it was, but they knew that anytime they opened the door of the shed, they heard nasty growls and hissing noises. And the smell, a powerful musky odor, was enough to drive you off all by itself. They had reason to believe that the animal, whatever it was, had raised a litter of young in the toolshed.
Their faces are patterned in black and white. Inexperienced people might confuse a badger with a raccoon or a skunk. The facial patterns are not alike–but if you came upon a snarling, hissing animal in your toolshed along about twilight, you might not hang around long enough to pick up the fine points of the field marks.
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Accurate badger sightings are the concern of Richard Warner of the Center for Wildlife Ecology of the Illinois Natural History Survey. At the request of the Illinois Department of Conservation, he is directing a survey of the badgers of Illinois: How many of them are there? Where do they live? And how do they live?
One investigator tried to keep a badger in her basement, but the animal was able to dig through the concrete floor. Its technique for doing this was carefully worked out and not just the application of brute force. The badger found a small crack in the floor and carefully dug at it until small bits of concrete began to flake off. It widened and deepened the crack one small piece at a time until it was able to get its front claws through the crack and under the concrete. Then it pulled up, breaking off piece after piece until the hole was big enough to squeeze into.
Badgers were probably common animals in presettlement Illinois. The prairie is their home, and it is unlikely that you would ever see one in the woods. Most likely they were common until after World War II. The prairies were gone by then, but there were a lot of cow pastures and hay fields that would have been good places for them.
Mason County is a particularly good spot in Illinois for badgers. It has very sandy soil–which makes for good digging–and it also has more prairie and savanna landscape than any other Illinois county. The DOC owns a 1,500-acre scrub-oak and prairie preserve there where badgers can be found regularly. There are also badgers at the Nashusa Grasslands, the large preserve near Dixon that is owned by the Nature Conservancy. The animals are strictly nocturnal, and are therefore rarely seen, but their burrows are distinctive. In addition to the elliptical shape, you can look for bones and fur of their prey scattered near the entrance.
