Creatures of the Dusk

Last weekend, Robert and I went to the park around dusk to take a short walk and we got to see a couple mammals - a bat, squirrels, and a small (first-year) eastern cottontail rabbit (cute!). On the way home, Robert stopped the car suddenly because he saw a skunk. But with a longer view, it was clear that although it had a skunk-like quality, it was huge, had an unusually flattened shape, and was colored wrong (black and white, but not striped like a skunk - it looked like it was a black animal wearing a white cape). When we got home, we looked up the mammals of NC and could not find anything that really matched what we saw. The next day, I had the thought that perhaps we didn't see it on the list of NC wildlife because it isn't wild at all - maybe it's an exotic pet that escaped or was set loose. With further googling, Robert suggested that perhaps it was a honey badger, and I think it was.


The honey badger is native to Africa and parts of the Middle East. It is considered the most fearless animal in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records.

According to wikipedia:

"The honey badger is found in arid grasslands and savannahs. Honey badgers are fierce carnivores with a keen sense of smell. They are known for their snake-killing abilities; they use their jaws to grab a snake behind its head and kill it. Honey badgers can devour a snake (150 cm/5ft or less) in 15 minutes.

Badgers have a large appetite for beehives. Commercial honey producers do not take kindly to this destruction and sometimes shoot, trap or poison badgers they suspect of damaging their hives, although badger-proof commercial bee hives have been developed.

The badger is among the fiercest hunters in its range, with prey including earthworms, insects, scorpions, porcupines, hares, ground squirrels, meerkats, mongooses and larger prey such as tortoises, crocodiles up to one metre in size, young gazelle and snakes (including pythons and venomous species). They also take lizards, frogs small rodents, birds and fruit.

The badger's ferocious reputation reflects its tendency to attack animals larger than itself; it is seldom preyed upon...

In a recent study (2009) undertaken by the magazine Scientific American it has been found that pound for pound the honey badger is the world's most fearsome land mammal as a result of its favourable claw to body ratio and aggressive behavioural tendencies...

It was also mentioned by Jeremy Clarkson on BBC Top Gear's Botswana Special that 'A Honey Badger does not kill you to eat you. It tears off your testicles.'"

I guess we need not worry about too much about whether this creature will be able to survive in the wild. As Robert pointed out, it appears the only real danger to him in W-S is cars.