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Want to eat steak for a month? One enterprising badger did, after finding a dead cow in the Utah mountains and burying it by himself.

Ethan Frehner of the University of Utah and colleagues left seven calf carcasses听in the area with camera traps to see what animals听would visit. They were hoping to learn more about vultures and other avian scavengers.

When they returned after a week, they found one was missing, and thought it must have been dragged away by a coyote or mountain lion.

The photos revealed otherwise. An American badger had buried the entire carcass over the course of five days. Afterwards, it spent two weeks in its underground burrow without leaving, and听kept returning to the burrow for several more weeks. Frehner thinks the badger was getting most of its sustenance from the cow for over 50 days.

American badgers are known to cache small items like rodents and rabbits, but they have never before been seen burying an animal bigger than itself.

鈥淲e know a lot about badgers morphologically and genetically, but behaviorally there鈥檚 a lot of blank spaces that need to be filled,鈥� says Frehner. He adds that听the behaviour could be good for cattle ranchers.听鈥淚t鈥檚 not beneficial to have rotting carcasses out among your other cattle because of disease vectors.鈥�

The study was published in .

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