Badger Facts

The North American badger has been the mascot of Merkel Tx for many many years, but how much do you actually know about the badger?  Here is a little info for you from Wikipedia.org.  

Behavior: The behavior of badgers differs by family, but all shelter underground, living in burrows called setts, which may be very extensive. Some are solitary, moving from home to home, while others are known to form clans called cetes, which vary from two to fifteen.

Badgers can run at (16–19 mph) for short periods of time.

Badgers are night animals.

In North America, coyotes sometimes eat badgers and vice versa, but the majority of their interactions seem to be mutual or neutral.^[15] American badgers and coyotes have been seen hunting together in a cooperative fashion.

What do they eat?  Badgers will eat nearly anything they can catch as well as fruit and roots.

History:  badgers were eaten by native Americans and early u.s. Settlers.  Their fur is still used for paintbrushes.

Badgers in Pop Culture: A badger god is featured in The Immortals by Tamora Pierce and "The Badger" is a comic book hero created by Mike Baron. The badger is the emblem of the Hufflepuff house of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Book series, it is chosen as such because the badger is an animal that is often underestimated, because it lives quietly until attacked, but which, when provoked, can fight off animals much larger than itself, which resembles the Hufflepuff house in several ways. Trufflehunter is a heroic badger in the Chronicles of Narnia book Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis. In Lafcadio Hearn's book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things there is a short story titled Mujina, which is a shapeshifting badger.

I hope you enjoyed reading about the true identity of our beloved mascot, the Badger!