Couple awaken to rarely-seen predators fighting outside West Texas ranch, video shows
.png "Tim McKenna and his wife woke up to strange, loud noises at their ranch near Big Bend National Park in Texas. They went outside and found two elusive predators fighting each other in the dark.")
In the dead of the night, at their middle-of-nowhere ranch, Tim McKenna and his wife Julie McKenna awakened to a “goshawful noise.”
It was loud and strange, and unlike anything they’d heard since moving out to West Texas over a decade ago.
Screeches and howls sometimes pierce the quiet of their high desert homestead — coyotes snatch up prey near the porch and snakes coil themselves around too-slow rabbits hiding under the house — but this wasn’t that.
“We’re really, really remote,” Tim McKenna said.
Situated about 20 miles outside Big Bend National Park, they are “off the grid,” he said. Wildlife isn’t shy of their property and they like it that way.
But these unfamiliar sounds had them both out of bed in a hurry.
“We had just gotten in bed maybe 15, 20 minutes earlier. It woke her up, woke me up,” Tim McKenna said. “We didn’t know what that noise was. It freaked my wife out, she was afraid.”
Now a professional photographer in his retirement, Tim McKenna reached immediately for his camera, while his wife grabbed some flashlights.
Then they headed outside.
“We didn’t see it, we heard it,” Tim McKenna said, letting their ears guide their eyes to the source. “When we got out to it, it was right there in front of us, and we couldn’t discern what it was, they were tangled up so much.”
The flashlights revealed two furry animals “locked together,” wrestling next to the porch.
“My wife was concerned, she was telling me to get back inside,” Tim McKenna said. He told Julie McKenna to keep the lighting focused so he could capture this moonlit brawl.
After a few moments, the animals separated and Tim McKenna finally recognized what they were: badgers.
Badgers are a rare sight, he said. In his 11 years at the ranch, he’s seen them only two other times, and they’ve never made a sound.
They’re “bigger than you think,” he said — like a medium-size dog with short legs.
Despite their somewhat modest stature, badgers are powerful predators and have “a reputation for ferociousness when attacked,” according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
With the initial tussle over, the badgers backed up about 40 feet from the house, where the dispute continued.
This time, it’s mostly one-sided, video shows. One badger is concentrating on digging a trench, while the other repeatedly inches toward it, bearing teeth and growling like a high-pitched car engine until they both lunge at each other.
Tim McKenna said he isn’t sure what the scuffle was all about. Was it a battle over turf, or something else?
“It may have been a mating ritual, you know?”
He shared the video on Facebook, and some users had similar theories.
“Looks like he is trying hard to impress him/her with his digging,” one comment said.
“A couple of times it almost looked like a dance!” wrote another.
Others were simply surprised to learn there are badgers in the area, and that they could be so vocal.
“This is so cool! I can honestly say that I never knew what sound badgers made,” one person commented.
Another dubbed Tim McKenna’s encounter a true “(National) Geographic moment.”
This story was originally published October 7, 2021 at 8:48 AM with the headline "Couple awaken to rarely-seen predators fighting outside West Texas ranch, video shows."