Month: October 2019

Autumn Hog Blog

/ nrowberry / Leave a comment

I’ve managed to go almost 2 whole months without doing another hog blog, but there’s been lots happening in the garden and I can no longer resist! Pink & Freda are still with us, plus at least one other hog, possibly more.

Pink is still using the nest box with the camera in, which is great. In the three months since she was released she has continued to ram the box full with leaves and straw. The first video below shows how empty the box was the night she was released – just the straw I’d put in there to start her off and you can still see the entrance tunnel on the right of the sleeping area.

 

Three months later and you can see how much nesting material she has managed to cram in there. Some days it is impossible to see anything through the camera because the leaves are pushed right up to the lens. Still it’s better for her to be well insulated than for me to have good views of her sleeping.

 

Here’s a view from outside Pink’s house. You can see how much nesting material is already in there and she’s still taking more in. Considering this will be her first winter, she is doing really well making her nest warm and snug. Fingers crossed she manages a successful hibernation.

 

Freda, our three legged hedgehog, continues to thrive in the garden. She can move very well on 3 legs and is surprisingly agile. The cameras caught her hopping over the bars at the bottom of the BBQ with no trouble at all:

 

Hedgehogs aren’t the only animals benefitting from the food we put out. We are also feeding several local cats. Most of the cats I think have perfectly good homes to go to, but one I suspect maybe a stray. He is an elderly looking gentleman, a sort of greyish tabby colour, who looks like he’s seen a lot of life! We’ve named him Roughtie Toughtie. I was pleased therefore to get a video of him and what I think is Freda sharing food quite amicably one night.

 

Freda was courted quite determinedly by a male hog called Wodan when she first returned to our garden in the summer. I had wondered whether she would have a second litter, but as it got to half way through October, there were no signs of any hoglets. But then last week I downloaded the camera footage and spotted what looked like a small one. I wasn’t sure at first but then found these clips which clearly show a much smaller one next to an adult. (sorry for the flashing effect on the video, not sure what was going on with the camera!)

The adult hog with the hoglet wasn’t Freda (too many legs), but then the hoglet may not have actually been with the adult, they may just have crossed paths. I’ll probably never know for sure whether they were Freda’s or another female’s.

Hedgehogs need to reach an absolute minimum of 450g by the time they start hibernating to stand a chance of surviving the winter. The bigger they are the better their chances, but anything below 450g at the start of November is going to need to be rescued. I’d only seen one hoglet but there might have been more, and the one I’d seen looked very small. I faced the prospect of sitting up that night trying to catch hoglets to weigh them.

So I wrapped up warm, took a torch, the kitchen scales and a pair of gloves outside with my kindle to read – potentially I could be out there a long time! Fortunately the hutch was empty so I had somewhere to put any hoglets I found – I prepped it with fresh bedding and food and water and sat down to wait. After an hour there had been no sightings of hedgehogs and I’d played a lot of sudoku on the kindle. Half an hour later and I could hear rustling but still no sightings of hedgehogs of any size. So I decided to have a walk about with the torch. Heading down the garden I spotted Freda, another adult (possibly Pink) and a hoglet! I grabbed the somewhat surprised hoglet and popped it on the scales – 240g, way too small to make it through the winter, so in the hutch it went. I gave it another half hour and went back out – another hoglet, just 206g this time. Into the hutch it went with its sibling. An hour later I thought I’d have one last look in case there were any more and spotted a third – 238g.

All three spend the night in the hutch until I could get them to Viv of Malvern Hedgehog Rescue (http://www.malvernhedgehogrescue.co.uk/) the next day.

The three hoglets turned out to be 2 females and 1 male. So far no other small hoglets have been spotted on the trail camera, so I’m hoping I managed to get the whole litter.

Roughtie Toughtie the cat spends a lot of time sleeping in our garden and since he looks like he may have no home,  we’ve bought him an outdoor kennel. Needless to say I have yet to see any evidence that he is using it, but we can but try. The night I caught the hoglets, I’d had the cameras out as usual and filmed one of the hoglets investigating the cat kennel just before I caught him/her for weighing. He or she struggles a bit to get in the big kennel, but was clearly determined to check it out.

 

I seem to be totally unable to resist a new gadget for watching wildlife in the garden. The latest one I found is this illuminated hedgehog feeder. The hogs don’t seem bothered at all by the light and started using it straight away. We’ve put it in front of our patio doors so we can sit on the sofa and watch them feeding. Freda has been using it and at least one other unidentified hog (not Pink as I’ve been able to watch her in her hedgehog house at the same time as this one was feeding in front of us). With the lights off in our living room, I can creep along the floor with the camera and photograph/video the hedgehogs feeding without them realising I’m there. Took a bit of trial and error working out how to stop the camera flash and also realising that I needed to clean the smudgy glass in the patio doors!

When I took the hoglet trio into Viv for overwintering, I ended up bringing back a bigger hog for fostering (seemed a fair swap). Gwendolen, as I’ve called her, just needs fattening up before she can be released. Hopefully if the weather stays mild this can be soon, but after the risks of bonfire night have passed. Here she is checking out the strange sounds and smells in our garden from her hutch.

 

So that’s a round up of hedgehog activity in the garden over the last couple of months – lots going on. To end though, the annual plea to please be careful if you’re considering building a bonfire this year. Bonfires just look like an ideal home to a hedgehog, so please only build them just before you’re going to light them. If for some reason you really have to gather the wood together earlier, please try and move it all before lighting or at the very least lift it up and check underneath for sleeping hedgehogs. Only light the fire from one side, to give any creatures under there the chance to escape from the other side. #rememberhedgehogs.

Moth Trap Intruders

/ nrowberry / 9 Comments

Nearly at the end of October and we’re coming to the end of “moth season”. Moth numbers are dwindling as the nights get colder, so it seems a good time to review what I’ve had in the trap. It’s been an interesting year for moths, but they aren’t the only animals the trap attracts. So I thought I’d share some of the Moth Trap Intruders (a name shamelessly copied from a very interesting Facebook group I’m a member of) I’ve had over the last few years.

Sadly I can’t compete with a blogger who had the most amazing moth trap intruder ever – a puffin! Have a read of http://www.surfbirds.com/community-blogs/amigo/2017/06/17/puffin-in-the-moth-trap/ if you don’t believe me.

But puffins aside, there is still quite a variety of animals that find their way into our moth trap. The biggest and probably most impressive non-moth I get in the trap is the May Bug or Cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha). It is a huge beetle and I remember being absolutely amazed the first time I found one in the trap. Chris wasn’t quite so impressed when I woke him about 5am waving a large beetle in his face!

The May Bug isn’t the only large beetle we get though. These jazzily coloured Sexton Beetles pop up occasionally too.  Not as big as the May Bugs, but the Wildlife Trusts describe these as the undertakers of the animal world, burying dead animals. Slightly gruesome to think that perhaps the reason these appear in the traps is because there is a dead mouse or bird nearby that they’ve been burying.

Smaller still are these, which I thought initially were water beetles. Thanks to a kind reader I now know they are bugs not beetles, a type of water boatman. They must have flown in from a nearby pond. Some summer nights they can appear in large numbers in the trap, trying to swim about ineffectually at the bottom. Caught and released into some water they whirl around surprisingly quickly.

Caddisflies are common intruders. There appears to be a variety of species, but I’ve yet to get to grips with identifying most of them. Some of them have quite strikingly patterned wings and look like they should be easy to identify, but I suspect they are more difficult than they look.

I did manage to identify one tiny black & white caddisfly, mainly because I initially thought it was a micro moth. It was so small, I potted it up to take a photo so that I could zoom in on it. Turned out not only to be a caddisfly, but to be a fairly rare species –  Leptocerus interruptus. It is associated with the Severn catchment which I suppose we just about come under here in Malvern.

Bees and especially wasps often end up in the moth trap and fly off in the morning when they have warmed up. In the summer months I sometimes put the whole trap inside a mosquito net tent to empty it. When there are large numbers of moths, they will sometimes escape quicker than I can count them and the net tent catches them before they disappear. I was a bit surprised one morning to find myself sitting in this tent with a large and slightly angry hornet! I have nothing against hornets, but being stuck in a small tent with one was slightly alarming even for me. The hornet found the entrance to the tent only slightly slower than I did (I rarely move that fast first thing in the morning), so I only got this one poor photo of it.

Another occasional intruder is the mayfly. These alien-like insects can hatch in their thousands if not millions and swarm over rivers. A lot of fishermen’s flies are designed to look like mayflies as they are a favourite food of fish like trout.

These beautiful green Lacewings are also occasionally attracted to the light. They are so transparent and delicate the camera struggles to focus on them and I’ve yet to take a photo that does them justice.

Various leafhoppers get attracted to the light. My favourite is the weird and wonderful Eared Leafhopper (Ledra aurita). Again difficult to photograph, these strange little insects are so well camouflaged I’ve never seen one in the wild, only when they come to the moth trap.

Various other invertebrates have also ended up in the moth trap over the years. Ladybirds, snails, slugs, spiders, flies, mosquitos and shield bugs have all appeared, but I’ve not thought to photograph them – something to keep in mind next summer.

Invertebrates may be attracted to the light but if I don’t get up early enough in the morning, birds are then attracted to the invertebrates. I may not have a puffin, but plenty of other birds have cottoned on to the benefits of moth trapping. The blackbirds have learned to check the grass around the trap in the morning for stray moths. The robins take their entomology to a whole other level though. If I turn my back they are on the trap itself and on one occasion I felt the robin literally land on my back itself. Whether I had a moth on my back or he was just trying to get a better view of the trap, I don’t know.  Once I’ve emptied the trap I put all the moths in a quiet corner of the garden near the house where they can rest up on the egg boxes until the next night. The birds of course have learned to watch where I put the eggs boxes. I have had to become increasingly devious to prevent them helping themselves to a moth buffet. The photo below is from a day where I obviously wasn’t careful enough!