In January 2016, Evan Buechley found one of his carcasses in Utah‘s Great Basin had disappeared. The conservation biologist, who leaves animal corpses out in the desert and sets up cameras to record scavengers, figured a pack of coyotes had dragged the 50-pound calf away.
But after a short search yielded no sign of the carcass, Buechley downloaded the camera’s images to see if he could find some clues. What he saw, no one had ever seen before.
Over the course of five days, the photos reveal, a single American badger excavated tunnels beneath the calf carcass until the whole thing collapsed into a pit. The badger then covered the carcass completely and constructed a burrow beside it, inside which it feasted on beef for 11 straight days.
A Later investigation into the scientific literature revealed no one had ever recorded a badger entomb anything larger than a jackrabbit.
“I was really shocked by the fact that these badgers could completely monopolize and dominate that food source,” says Buechley, who published a study on the new behavior March 31 in the Western North American Naturalist with three colleagues from the University of Utah, including National Geographic Explorer Çağan Şekercioğlu.
“This is an interesting niche, and it may be badgers are playing a more important role in the nutrient cycle than anybody knew.”
