New Forest Badger Group

Welcome to the New Forest Badger Group Website

Founded in 1971, the group monitors an extensive number of Badger Setts across 144 acres of The New Forest National Park.

Year by year the group have recorded in detail the seasonal activities and changes of a number of selected Setts.

With the help of Forestry England (previously The Forestry Commission), the New Forest Badger Group have been able to assess the successes and failures of Badger Setts as they compete with the ever increasing pressures of a popular tourist destination. The New Forest is still a wild place and continues to support a healthy population of Badgers.

The ‘New Forest Badger Protection Group’ was officially formed on the 22nd June 1971.

It is the oldest welfare-based monitoring of a local Badger population anywhere in the United Kingdom.

Within 2 years, the Badger Group along with Forestry Commission employees had completed a mapped based survey of Badger setts around the New Forest.

The 1973 report stated that 68% of the surveyed setts were active and 60% of those were breeding setts. It was estimated that 120 cubs were born each year.

Eric Ashby is rightly named as the driving force behind the formation of Badger protection in the New Forest and a wider appreciation of Badgers and other wildlife in the UK.

His groundbreaking natural history documentaries conveyed compassion and field craft, showing, for the first time in detail, the secret life of our native wild animals.

The success of New Forest Badger protection lead to the formation of many similar groups across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There are now over 50 affiliated Badger groups and over 70,000 Badger social groups across the United Kingdom.