Badger

On the Kings Lane on Saturday morning, as I cycled up to football with my son, we found a dead badger in the gateway by a field. It didn't look as if it had been hit by a car but was neatly laid out on the floor, dead. Perhaps it had a disease or died in the cold ? It certainly had astonishingly long claws and a perfect coat, all bristling silver hairs with black underneath. I remember my Father had a badger hair shaving brush, incredibly soft strong bristles and this begs the question - Where do shaving brush manufacturers get badger hair? Badgers are protected and I don't believe that they are farmed for fur and I doubt if teams of Gillette road kill collectors scour the lanes ? I took the badger home, having collected my trailer as it was surprisingly heavy, and laid it out to photograph and draw. It was a bit cold drawing and I got distracted by talking to my neighbour Mike over the fence and I'm not 'allowed' to take big dead things in the house, so I will have to settle for photographs. I think it's a bit big for me to deal with as a novice taxidermist and my 'special' freezer is full already so I will hide it away outside for nature to 'do it's business' and then perhaps retrieve the bones so that I can reconstruct the skeleton, watch this space.