I'm reading The Badgers of Wytham Woods, which covers the fifty years studying badgers in this Oxford University woodland. It's also where they did great work on great tit societies.
You can watch a short film about the badgers.
Anyway, turns out that badgers don't defend territories like other carnivores: they socialise at the peripheries. They also visit other setts and sometimes move sett, but most of the babies born in a sett will stay living there throughout their lives. They are unusual.
There are fights - and killings. But they seem to be more about infanticide than about territory. At least, that's what I have gathered so far.
That encouraged me - the idea of vitalization at the peripheries. Until I returned to the garden and witnessed robin violence.
I had started to think that one of the neighbour robins might be a female, whom Bobbit tolerated. On this occasion, toleration was far from the avian mind.
Later in the day, I went out again. Bobbit was calm - but also very secluded.
This is a long video, because I think that the intimacy of the grooming is rarely seen in this detail and at this proximity.
I was reading online how essential to good health and well being that preening is - keeping clean and having all the many, many feathers in their proper places.