My First Badger Photography Experience: Waiting for Darkness

European Badger emerging from the woodland after dark during my first evening photographing badgers from a hide.

A quiet evening in a woodland hide began with a Kingfisher and ended, several hours later, with my first real opportunity to photograph a badger after dark. It proved to be as much a test of patience and equipment as photography.

I arrived at the hide with badgers very much in mind, but wildlife rarely follows the plan we have made for it.

By 6:15pm I was set up, initially with the Nikon Z8 and Z 400mm f/4.5. The weather had been wet, although thankfully the rain had stopped, and there was still enough natural light to photograph what appeared before dusk.

It wasn't a badger.

It was a Kingfisher.

An unexpected opening act

The Kingfisher was already active around the hide and at one point returned with a surprisingly large fish.

That immediately gave me something worthwhile before the evening had really begun. The bird spent some time perched nearby after swallowing its catch, apparently quite content with my presence inside the hide.

Kingfisher returning to its perch with a substantial catch during an evening at the woodland hide.

As the light continued to fall, however, the ISO climbed rapidly. Eventually there was little point continuing with the Kingfisher. The evening was moving into its next phase.

A squirrel appeared to my right and watched proceedings for a while. Then the woodland began changing around me.

The woodland changes shift

One of the pleasures of spending several hours in a hide is noticing changes that would be easy to miss on a shorter visit.

Large numbers of corvids began descending into their evening roost. Initially I thought I was simply hearing crows, but with the Merlin Bird ID app recording, the soundtrack was identified as mainly rooks and jackdaws.

They were incredibly noisy.

Somewhere beyond the hide a Tawny Owl began calling. I never saw it, but its call became another part of the evening.

Then, at around 7:37pm, the roost finally began to settle.

After all that noise, the sudden quiet was remarkable.

Now every rustle in the vegetation seemed significant.

Preparing for the badgers

With the light fading, the hide was reset for the evening's main subject: badgers.

The hide's external lighting came on as darkness took over, giving me enough illumination to photograph any badgers that appeared.

By then I had changed from the 400mm to the NIKKOR Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S.

That proved to be the right decision.

The expected feeding area was relatively close to the hide, and 200mm gave me considerably more flexibility if an animal approached. More importantly, f/2.8 was becoming essential.

My initial exposure under the lights was around 1/200 sec at f/2.8 and ISO 5000.

Then the ISO became 8000.

Then 12,800.

A few small rodents scampered around, although they appeared wary of the lights. Strategically placed peanuts were waiting for rather larger customers.

So was I.

Coffee poured, camera ready, Animal detection selected on the Z8.

There wasn't much more to do.

8:30pm. Nothing.

The badgers were expected at roughly 8:30pm.

At 8:30 the woodland was quiet.

This is the reality of wildlife photography that photographs themselves rarely show. You can prepare the equipment, choose your settings, position yourself carefully and understand the behaviour of your subject.

Then you wait.

And wait.

Wildlife has no interest whatsoever in your timetable.

At 9:15pm, approximately three hours after I had first settled into the hide, a badger finally appeared.

Ten minutes

The first encounter was brief.

The badger appeared, then disappeared again.

A little later it returned, ate a few peanuts and wandered away once more. Across the two visits I probably had around ten minutes with it.

Three hours of anticipation for perhaps ten minutes of photography.

And it was worth every minute.

European Badger moving through the woodland after dark during a brief visit to the feeding area.

Photographing it was considerably harder than I had anticipated. Badgers present an interesting technical problem. They are active in very low light, they don't remain perfectly still, and their coat contains both very dark fur and pale facial markings.

Maintaining enough shutter speed therefore mattered more to me than keeping the ISO low.

One of my favourite frames from the evening was made with the Nikon Z8 and NIKKOR Z 70-200mm f/2.8 VR S at 200mm, 1/320 sec, f/2.8 and ISO 11,400.

That ISO figure sounds alarming when viewed in isolation.

European Badger searching for food under the woodland lights during a brief encounter after dark.

But the following morning, after processing the RAW file through DxO PureRAW the detail remaining in the coat surprised me. More importantly, the badger was sharp.

That reinforced something I've increasingly found with modern wildlife photography:

Noise is manageable. Motion blur isn't.

I would much rather bring home a sharp photograph at ISO 11,400 than a beautifully clean file at ISO 3200 in which the animal has moved.

When the badger looked back

One moment in particular made the evening for me. After spending much of its brief visit searching the ground for food, the badger paused and looked directly towards the hide.

That moment became the opening photograph for this Blog. The eye contact gives the image something more than simply being a record of my first badger encounter.

The woodland behind remains dark, while the badger's face catches the artificial light. During processing I deliberately resisted the temptation to brighten the shadows too much.

It was night, and I wanted the photograph to feel like night.

The external lighting inevitably affected the colour of the original file, particularly the warmer tones and surrounding greens. I corrected these carefully without trying to make the scene resemble daylight.

For me, retaining the atmosphere of that brief encounter was far more important.

Video in almost no light

I also managed to record some 4K 50p video. With the shutter at 1/50 sec and the lens at f/2.8, the Z8 was working at around ISO 2000. Compared with the 1/320 sec needed for stills, that slower shutter speed made a substantial difference in the available light.

The short video below captures part of that brief encounter, showing the badger moving naturally through the feeding area. After spending so long waiting in near silence, being able to record a little of its behaviour as well as the still photographs made the evening feel complete.

https://youtu.be/U4mNBTsUM4Y?si=lAUavqd77Tt9lRzb

More than the photograph

I went to the hide hoping to photograph badgers.

I came home with photographs of a Kingfisher, including one carrying a substantial fish, memories of a squirrel watching from beside the hide, recordings of rooks and jackdaws gathering noisily to roost, a Tawny Owl calling somewhere in the darkness and, eventually, my first proper badger photographs.

The badger itself gave me perhaps ten minutes.

But those ten minutes wouldn't have meant quite as much without the three hours that came before them.

That's one of the things I continue to enjoy about wildlife photography. The photograph may occupy 1/320 of a second. The experience behind it can take an entire evening.

And sometimes the waiting is part of the photograph.