The badger hunts by digging faster than its prey can flee. It is built for exactly that: a broad, flat, short-legged wedge of muscle with long front claws, and it goes after the desert's burrowing rodents by excavating straight into their tunnels and driving them toward a sealed end. A ground squirrel's burrow is a refuge from most predators. To a badger it is just the run it has to out-dig.
How good the digging is turns out to be hard to put a number on; the honest record is an anecdote of several people with shovels failing to keep up with one badger in hard ground. What has been documented, once, is stranger. Over a fifteen-year study on the Alberta prairie, a single badger was seen carrying 37 objects to plug 23 ground-squirrel tunnel mouths, apparently sealing its prey underground. That one animal was judged a genuine tool user. It was one exceptional badger, far from here, and not something the species is generally known to do.
It is a solitary animal, unrelated to the social badgers of Europe and to the African honey badger that shares its reputation. It takes a heavy toll on precisely the burrowing rodents that engineer this ground — ground squirrels, kangaroo rats, pocket gophers — plus lizards and insects. Where a badger works an area, the tunnel systems that so much else depends on get turned over.
It belongs to this desert scrub and ranges from the flats well up into high country. We've not verified one on the parcel, but the badger leaves the clearest sign of any predator here, and you are far likelier to find the dig than the digger: a broad, flat-bottomed hole with a fan of thrown soil, where a burrow used to be.
You may have heard that badgers and coyotes hunt together, the badger digging while the coyote waits to catch whatever bolts. They do, but every documented case is far to the north and east of here, out on the Great Plains and the Great Basin, so on this ground it stays a good story rather than a local fact. What the badger does here it does alone.
Look for the hole, not the animal. A fresh badger dig is a doorway someone left by going straight down.