A rare badger sighting near Canmore has been caught on camera.
An Alberta Environment and Parks remote camera study, in partnership with the Town of Canmore being carried out in and around Canmore’s wildlife corridors, picked up am American badger near Wind Valley, on the eastern edge of Three Sisters.
“It was the first badger in this study and all the other studies we’ve done,” said John Paczkowski, a Canmore-based wildlife biologist with Alberta Environment and Parks (AEP).
“We know they’re around in low densities, but we’ve got hundreds of thousands of camera days out there and never a badger.”
Badgers belong to the weasel family and are related to mink, marten and wolverine. Spending much of their life underground, badgers are sensitive animals and are rarely seen.
Adult badgers hunt primarily at night and remain underground during the day. On the other hand, studies have shown juveniles tend to be active during daylight hours.
In the early 1900s there was widespread persecution of badgers – they were relentlessly shot, trapped and poisoned – and most populations never recovered.
But today, there are other threats too. Development, continued hunting and trapping and highway mortality are equally as threatening to the survival of badgers into the future.
In Alberta, the badger was once common throughout the parkland and grassland regions south of the North Saskatchewan River, but, according to AEP’s website, its current distribution has been much reduced.
The badger is considered sensitive because of its local distribution, but a detailed status assessment by Alberta’s endangered species conservation committee identified the badger as data deficient, meaning there is not enough information to determine its status.
Federally, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) considered the prairie population of badgers, including in Alberta, as of special concern.
