Dietary response of the Eurasian badger, Meles meles, to a decline of its main prey in the Doñana National Park

Abstract

The Eurasian badger (Meles meles) is considered to be a harvester rather than a hunter (Kruuk, 1989), because its food usually consists of vegetables and small and easily captured animals, such as worms and insects, and it rarely captures mammals (Neal, 1986). However, in the Doñana National Park of Mediterranean Spain the badger apparently behaves as a facultative specialist in the consumption of young rabbits, Oryctolagus cuniculus (Martín, Rodríguez & Delibes, 1995). In 1990, an outbreak of Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease (RHD) caused high mortality among adult rabbits in most of the Doñana area (Villafuerte et al., 1994), although all sites of Doñana were not affected to the same extent. This situation offered the possibility of comparing the food habits of badgers in the Doñana Biological Reserve (DBR) before (data of Martín et al., 1995) and after the outbreak of RHD, while using another site where rabbit density has changed little over the last few years as a control area.