Badger Also a man walking his dog. As long as I stayed down— mind (the man and breeze) he paid no attention to me or to my noisy footsteps. I would freeze when he looked at me. On two occasions I could not keep myself downward and got a bit off to one side; he immediately became suspicious and peered in my direction, and changed his course to get further away. When alarmed, both animals elevated the stiffly tail to a vertical position. On one occasion he turned abruptly upward to its base of a large, somewhat smoky live oak and sniffed in the leaves. A few inches in front of his nose a small animal awkwardly climbed up the trunk of the oak into the border. The badger did not see it but realized at once that something had climbed up. The badger peered up into the tree and even raised up and put his feet on a low branch and crawled up into the tree, then resumed hunting in the original direction. The prey seemed most like a young chipmunk, but since I have seen no chipmunks this year, it may have been a persimmon calf or a woodrat (but there was no stick nest). The whole hunting process was very shamblelike. I was impressed by how poor their vision is and how much they must operate by olfaction.