{"id":735025,"date":"2026-08-11T23:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T23:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/735025\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T23:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T23:26:08","slug":"drought-drives-hungry-badgers-to-tear-up-golf-courses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/735025\/","title":{"rendered":"Drought drives hungry badgers to tear up golf courses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Redditch Golf Club in Worcestershire has also been targeted by badgers and said areas under irrigation were particularly affected.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the current drought, the surrounding ground is extremely dry, so watered areas remain softer and provide a valuable source of moisture and food,\u201d a club spokesman said. \u201cThis is attracting wildlife such as badgers, foxes and birds, which are digging for grubs and other food sources.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jim Croxton, the chief executive of the British and International Golf Greenkeeping Association, said the badgers were looking for chafer grubs, the root-eating larvae of chafer beetles.<\/p>\n

\u201cBadgers generally dig turf to find food and August is the beginning of the period when chafer grubs are generally present,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would be more likely to be present in damper turf than dried out turf as they have the moisture to develop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, Britain endured the driest July since records began in 1836.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Met Office said on Tuesday that this summer was on course to beat 1976<\/a> and become the hottest ever.<\/p>\n

It is \u201cincreasingly likely\u201d that 2026 will surpass the long, hot summer of 50 years ago and record the highest average daily maximum temperatures in history, it said.<\/p>\n

The forecaster said that drought conditions and high temperatures of up to 38C (100F) would see the summer also record the highest ever average temperature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Redditch Golf Club in Worcestershire has also been targeted by badgers and said areas under irrigation were particularly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":735026,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[1047,5904,50,101,2783,5438,74408,56,225,1018,54,55,4407,58636],"class_list":["post-735025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-drought","tag-golf","tag-news","tag-sports","tag-staffordshire","tag-standard","tag-suffolk","tag-uk","tag-uk-news","tag-uk-weather","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife","tag-worcestershire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/735026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}