Little Badger Buries Entire Cow — on Camera

An industrious badger in Utah's Great Basin Desert was caught on camera burying a cow four to five times the little animal's own size.

The behavior has never been seen in the wild, and it was a total surprise to the researchers who accidentally captured time-lapse video of the burial, the scientists said. It was particularly surprising because they were attempting to study scavenging birds, not badgers, the researchers said. The badger spent five days excavating a hole around the cow carcass and burying the animal in it, before lolling around near its cache of food for weeks.

"Not to anthropomorphize too much, but he looks like a really, really, happy badger, rolling in the dirt and living the high life," University of Utah doctoral candidate in biology Evan Buechley, who discovered the footage, said in a statement.

Missing body

To document the behavior of scavengers like vultures, Buechley dragged seven calf carcasses out to the Grassy Mountains west of Salt Lake City. He and his colleagues set up camera traps by the staked-down carcasses so they could monitor what kind of scavengers visited. After a week, Buechley returned to the study site and found only six carcasses.