WE were returning to our village late one night after a baby-sitting session and were delighted to see a badger ambling down the centre of the road directly ahead.

It seemed unperturbed by our presence and continued its rather slow progress for some yards while bathed in the beam of our headlights before veering away into an adjoining copse and vanishing from our sight.

Although I have not explored the copse in question, I suspect it houses some badger setts and I am sure we encountered our specimen on one of its regular nightly jaunts.

Badgers tend to emerge under cover of darkness to seek food and water, and they stubbornly use the same track each time.

Eventually, this well-used path through their territory becomes very prominent, even to the most casual of observers, and further signs can be seen in black and white hairs clinging to barbed wire fences or prickly shrubs.

Some badger paths along the route of my morning walk are down to bare earth through constant use, and I can see, after heavy rain, how the animals slide and skid down steep slopes where the grass or vegetation has been worn away.

I am not sure whether our sighting was a male or female, although I suspect it was a female owing to the rather small size.

She was distinctly unkempt too, with lots of yellowish-tan fur showing among the more usual grey, and she ambled rather than ran. An elderly badger perhaps?

If our badger was a young female, however, she might already have a litter of cubs to feed and care for.

Although mating can occur at almost any time between February and October, the fertilised egg is not implanted until December, with cubs being born any time between the following January and the middle of March.

A litter usually comprises two or three cubs and they will live in a deep burrow, warmly lined with dry grass, straw or other vegetation. They remain for about two months, often as part of a larger family group who live a communal life in their huge sett.

Badgers are very social animals and scrupulously clean. They remove used bedding from their setts at regular intervals and replace it with dry straw, grass, bracken and other vegetation.

More evidence of their cleanliness lies in the fact they organise a special place as a toilet and use it on a regular basis. This can comprise several pits spread over an area some distance away from the entrance to their sett, often marking the outer boundaries of the badgers' territory.

In many parts of the country, a badger is known as brock and this name appears in many place names, such as farms called Brock Rigg or Brock Hall, and in locations like a series of farms near Danby Wiske bearing the name Brockholme, which means "the field where badgers are found."

A major problem with badgers is that they are accused of causing tuberculosis among cattle.

Whether the bacteria is transferred from the badger to the cattle, or from the cattle to the badger and back to the cattle, or even merely from cattle to cattle without the badger's involvement, is something which continues to exercise the minds of scientists.

Whether badgers actually cause tuberculosis among cattle has never been satisfactorily answered, even if they have been blamed for it over the last 30 years or so.

Nonetheless, it seems the Government is considering another cull of badgers throughout the country in an attempt to halt the spread of tuberculosis.

Following my notes about the work of the British Trust for Ornithology (D&S, March 7), I have received further details of their Garden BirdWatch scheme, along with the means of joining the organisation.

This is the UK's leading bird research organisation, with more than 30,000 bird watchers contributing to its surveys.

Some 16,000 of them maintain a systematic year-round list of birds seen in their gardens and those joint endeavours form the basis of conservation action in this country.

For anyone wishing to take part, an information pack is available, and the BTO also publishes a magazine - Bird Table - which is the magazine of the Garden BirdWatch scheme, in addition to a wonderful handbook on garden birds.

For details on how to join the Garden BirdWatch scheme, or merely to receive an information pack, you should write to Garden BirdWatch, British Trust for Ornithology, Freepost IP24 2BR, or you can telephone them on 01842 750050.

Their address is The Nunnery, Thetford, Norfolk IP24 2PU if you don't wish to use the Freepost address, and there is also a website - www.bto.org

The BTO is a registered charity with support from the Government, industry and conservation organisations, and the cost of joining the Garden BirdWatch is £12 per annum. It's worth it for the handbook alone!

Those with access to the BTO web site can now compare their own sightings with those from other gardens locally.

All you do is type in your own post code - so why not visit www.postcodebirds.bto.org/

While on the subject of birds, I have received an e-mail from a reader living at Neasham near Darlington, who refers to my notes about goldfinches.

Over the past few weeks, I had noticed three on our bird feeder and a further group of them among some trees along the route of my morning walk.

My correspondent tells me that he has had up to ten on regular occasions at his bird table, and since he bought a thistle feeder, which is supplied with thistle seed obtainable from a garden centre, he has been regularly visited by a charm of half a dozen.

This happened last year when they all vanished at nesting time, but they returned later in the year.

He tells me that siskins also enjoy the thistle seed. Siskins are also regular visitors to our bird feeder. They seem to favour the period just after dawn when I've counted four together, often fighting for space with greenfinches, great tits, blue tits and house sparrows.

In recent weeks, there has been some publicity about the fact that many of us continue to reveal our superstitious nature despite living in the twenty-first century.

It is difficult to be specific about the most common of our superstitions, but those associated with number 13 are probably among the most widely practiced.

We tend to take extra care on the 13th day of the month, we don't like living in houses bearing number 13 and we hate having 13 at a dinner table.

Lots of us practice superstitions without realising. One of the most often used is the crossed fingers, a practice which is thought to bring luck or to avert bad fortune.

People will cross their fingers when embarking on some tricky endeavour or even when dipping into a pile of raffle tickets in the hope of extracting a prize.

One of the best known means of avoiding bad fortune concerns the wisest time to cut one's finger nails.

A number of people still believe it is bad luck to cut finger nails on a Friday or Saturday, while to cut them on a Sunday is to invite the closest attention of the devil himself.

The best time to cut finger nails, so it appears, is either a Monday or a Tuesday, and in parts of the north of England it was a widespread belief that a young married woman who cut her right hand nails with her left hand would rule her husband.

One of the best known superstitions is that it is very unwise to cut a baby's fingernails before he or she is 12 months old.

This persists even today, with mother's preferring to bite the growing nails rather than trim them with scissors.

One belief was that if a child's nails were cut before the age of 12 months, then he or she would grow up to be a thief, and in some areas children's nails were cut over a Bible in an attempt to thwart any bad influences.

One very strange belief was that the forefinger of the right hand was known as the poison finger.

It was considered to be venomous, so much so that one should never apply ointments with that fingertip. The middle finger should be used, although in some areas the third finger of the left hand, also known as the ring finger, could also be used to apply ointments to sores and cuts.