This pigeon-toed, round-shouldered ground hugger is dirty yellowish gray with a dark brown face striped with white. It may grow to more than two feet long and weigh up to twenty-five pounds. The badger has thirty-four sharp teeth and a menacing growl and hiss that make it about as sociable as a grizzly bear. Being a close cousin to the skunk, it doesn’t smell very good. An acute sense of smell enables the badger to locate food underground. It eats snake and snails, insects, rats and mice, gophers, ground squirrels, and other rodents. Occasionally it will kill ground-nesting birds and eat their nestlings or eggs, but the badger saves many more birds than it destroys. The rodents it usually kills are animals that hunt birds. And the holes it digs in its quest for food provide homes for many animals.