I’ve been getting some really nice hoggy video clips from the assorted cameras in the garden lately; the perfect excuse for another hog blog!

Freda our resident 3-legged hog is still with us and doing well around the garden. It is now about a month since she was wooed by Wodan, so if she is pregnant we may well have the patter of tiny hoglet feet soon. Part of me hopes so, but at the same time it is late in the season to be having babies, so they may struggle to put on enough weight for the winter, so I am also worried for her and potentially them. Watch this space.

In the meantime though we still have plenty of other hedgehog activity. Wodan seems to have wandered off now that he’s either had his wicked way with Freda or finally got the message that she’s having none of it. But we do have Pink, a juvenile hedgehog that I fostered until she was big enough to be released. Pink came from a litter of hoglets that couldn’t be returned to where she came from (the best option) due to a dog attack. Instead she seems happy to make her home in our garden, although she is of course free to come and go as she pleases. Here she meets Freda, just a couple of nights after she was released into the garden. Freda is considerably larger than Pink, who wisely tucks herself up as Freda approaches.

Fortunately Freda was more interested in the food than in Pink and they both carried on eating without any further argument.

Pink seems to have decided to make one of our hedgehog houses her regular home, which is great. She has been really busy the last week furnishing it to her liking – in and out with as much nesting material as she can find. For a young hedgehog she is doing a fantastic job at nest building, even if she is sometimes a bit over-ambitious with the stuff she tries to drag in there.

It is amazing how much she can carry in her mouth and how determined she is to get it all back to the house.

Fortunately the house she has chosen to nest in is the one with a built-in camera. So not only do I have footage of her gathering from outside, I can also see her bringing it in from the inside.

Her behaviour pattern seems to be to wake up when it gets dark (as she should of course), then go out for something to eat for the next few hours. Around 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning she then resumes her nest building until it starts to get light. Finally as the sun comes up she retires to bed for the day. As hedgehogs shouldn’t really be out in the day, it’s not often I get daylight footage; but this is her heading back to the nest first thing in the morning after a hard night’s eating and gathering.

She’s packed her nest so full that it’s getting a bit of a struggle to get in there. She has to clamber over the pile of leaves and grass, before pulling it back over herself. She can then snuggle down (with a bit of a yawn) safely away from draughts until it’s time to start all over again.

So hopefully both Pink and Freda will continue to make our garden their home. The garden is not enclosed so they are free to roam if they wish. Hopefully though they will realise that here they have a plentiful supply of food, hedgehog houses and more than enough weeds and wildlife to provide for all their hedgehoggy needs. And we will get to continue to enjoy their company in our garden.