Hedgehogs

Hedgehog Hydration

/ nrowberry / 2 Comments

Our hedgehogs seem to be getting mighty picky with their food this week. After the successes of the first few nights of the feeding station, they’ve been turning their little hoggy noses up at my latest offerings. Lots of videos of them going into the box, looking at the food and wandering back out again. Of course because the neighbourhood cat can’t get into the box, I’m left with a bowl of smelly cat food to dispose of each morning.

So far they’ve refused 2 supermarket brands and two supposedly upmarket pet brands of catfood. I’ve been avoiding fishy flavours, but so far they’ve rejected chicken, beef, lamb and even duck! If anyone has any suggestions as to which is the best cat food to feed them with, it would be much appreciated.

But there is good news. They may not be eating the food I’ve put out, but they have at least been drinking the water.  We’ve been leaving bowls of water around the garden and I finally had the brainwave of leaving one in front of the camera. Sure enough at least one of our hogs has been drinking from it.

They don’t show much respect for the water bowl though – this one tramping through it when he or she decides they’ve had enough!

This is really good news as hedgehogs can apparently become dehydrated in hot weather. The Hedgehog Preservation Society advises all gardeners to leave water out for their hedgehogs (and for other wildlife).

So you can lead a hedgehog to food but you cannot make him eat – but you can at least get him to have a good drink! Perhaps the not eating thing is actually a good sign – that they are not that hungry and our garden is providing enough natural food. I hope so.

Hedgehog Feeding Station

/ nrowberry / 22 Comments

“If you build, it they will come” – not originally referring to hedgehogs, but I was hoping it would still hold true. Following my previous post about attempts to feed hedgehogs mainly ending with success at feeding neighbouring cats, I got some very helpful suggestions via Twitter. Probably the most helpful was from Paula who suggested I try out the instructions for building your own feeding station on Little Silver Hedgehog’s excellent blog (https://littlesilverhedgehog.wordpress.com/2016/06/20/build-a-hedgehog-feeding-station/)

The idea behind the feeding station is simple enough – provide a safe place for the hedgehog to eat with an entrance hole too small for the cats to get in. I’m not the most DIY-minded person, but thought I could just about manage this! So one plastic box, a pair of scissors, some sticky tape and a brick later, this was the result!

The Box

It may not be a build of great architectural beauty, but I was hoping the hedgehogs wouldn’t be too bothered by the aesthetics (or the choice of reading material I’d lined the bottom with). The catfood went at one end and the trail cam was set up and I just had to wait for morning to see if it worked.

In the morning I was really chuffed to find that the food had all been eaten – of course the question was – Who or What ate it? Trail cam footage first showed the usual cunning cat peering at the box and looking mildly annoyed that it couldn’t get to the food. Then at about 12:40 am the hedgehog appeared to view my handiwork for the first time.

He or she was cautious at first, peering in and eating some food near the entrance.

Then followed a few more nervous entries into the box until by 3am our hedgehog was striding in and going straight for the food. Clearly his or her confidence was such that by the morning all the food had gone.

I am so pleased with this – it has way exceeded my expectations, especially for a first night trial. I’ve stocked up on catfood and hopefully this success will continue throughout the summer. The only slightly annoying thing is that my trail cam will only record 15 seconds at a time when in night-time mode, but I can live with that.

I can’t thank Little Silver Hedgehog enough for her excellent advice (do check out her blog for all things hedgehog related https://littlesilverhedgehog.wordpress.com/) and Paula on Twitter for pointing me in the right direction in the first place. Social media working at its best!

2021 update – Please note that since I wrote this blog, concern has been raised about feeding hedgehogs with mealworms. It is no longer considered advisable to feed hedgehogs with mealworms. The concern is that hedgehogs that eat a lot of mealworms could develop a condition called Metabolic Bone Disease. So please just stick to either meaty cat or dog food, dry cat food or a good quality (i.e. high protein content) hedgehog food.

On the Trail of a Hedgehog

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Hedgehog in bowlFor the last few weeks I’ve been on a bit of a mission to capture some footage of our garden hedgehogs. As always when using our Trail Cam it’s a bit hit or miss what footage we get, with the usual array of grass flapping and leaves falling tending to dominate the films.

I’ve been putting out bowls of catfood, not just to try and film the hedgehogs but also to give them a bit of a helping hand when they might have young. Not too surprisingly though, if you put out catfood you get – cats! In this case one of the neighbours’ cats has learnt this is an easy midnight feast when he’s peckish, although in the footage below he has to share it with some very large slugs!

I have an awful lot of clips of the same black cat stuffing his furry face each night.

Most of the time I persevered with the cat food, until I happened to find a pack of blueberries at the back of the fridge that had gone a bit squishy for my liking. Again I thought this might tempt our hog – again I was wrong. They were all still there in the morning. On the plus side one of our blackbirds did like the look of them. I don’t know if he’s been in a fight with other blackbirds or even the cat, but he’s the scruffiest blackbird ever. But he did like the blueberries – I was a bit worried when I saw this that he was going to choke on one, but he seemed to gobble them down in the end and is still flying tattily around the garden with no ill effects.

The robin (probably the same one who stalks my moth trap) has also learnt that the hedgehog bowl is easy pickings. He’s not that keen on the catfood, but has tried most of my other offerings.

I have managed to get some clips of the hedgehog feeding or at least investigating the bowl. We’ve definitely got 2 adult hedgehogs using the garden as I’ve seen them some evenings, but never managed to get them both to come to the food bowl at the same time!

If nothing else my attempts to feed the hedgehogs are supporting a variety of other wildlife in the garden – blackbird, robin, slugs, assorted flies and spiders and of course the neighbours’ cat! The brief glimpses we get of the hedgehogs though make it all worthwhile. The clips may only be short (for some reason the trail cam won’t do videos of more than 15 seconds at night?), but they give a small insight into the lives of our hoggy friends that we wouldn’t get otherwise.

Hedgehog Update

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Just a quick update on our garden hedgehogs. The good news is that we spotted 2 healthy looking adult hedgehogs in the garden last night as it was getting dark. One was more adventurous and came out for a bowl of catfood, the other stayed in the bushes waiting for us to go away.

Adult hedgehog

Whilst it was great to see that we still had our adult hedgehogs, I was then worried that perhaps I’d unnecessarily removed the 2 babies I found on the hot lawn earlier in the week. Of course there is no guarantee that the 2 adults we saw last night were the parents. I contacted the hedgehog rescue lady who reassured me that we’d done the right thing removing the babies from the heat as they could have become dehydrated, got fly strike, or even been predated. They certainly shouldn’t have been out by themselves in the middle of the hot afternoon. Better to have taken them to safety than take any chances.  She also assured me that the babies were doing well.

I’ll probably put the trail camera out over the weekend and hope we get some better footage of our hedgehog friends, so perhaps more updates next week.

Too Hot for Hedgehogs

/ nrowberry / 4 Comments

It’s boiling in Malvern today as it is around much of the country. Fortunately I managed to escape work early and got home mid afternoon. And it was really lucky I did – I went out into the garden to find two baby hedgehogs sitting out in the heat on the lawn.

DSC_8929

They were so small and although one was snuffling about the other wasn’t very lively – no wonder as the thermometer was saying 37°C!

I had a quick look around the garden but no sign of adults, so I phoned our local hedgehog rescue centre. Thank goodness the wonderful woman answered the phone and told me to grab them quick and phone her back. One convenient large plant pot later…

DSC_8935

Fortunately the rescue lady was just around the corner so I took the babies down there straightaway. She weighed them – 82 and 90g, a male and a female – and estimated they were about 3 and a half weeks old as their teeth were just coming through. They were apparently in reasonable health and not dehydrated so she said the chances of them surviving were good.

Whilst I am relieved to hear these babies will probably make it, it is very sad to think that it probably means the mother is dead. We have been watching hedgehogs in the garden over the last few months and it’s really upsetting to think one of them may have died. Thank goodness I didn’t get home any later from work to find 2 dead baby hedgehogs in the heat on the lawn.

The lady at the rescue centre has taken my details and says when they are grown enough to survive we can have 2 back. She will apparently give us one of our original ones plus a different one (to avoid inbreeding between brother and sister). So at least that will hopefully be a happy ending. Hopefully I can give an update later in the year.

If anyone find a hedgehog in need of help in Malvern the rescue centre details can be found at http://www.malvernhedgehogrescue.co.uk/ It is run on a completely voluntary basis and relies on donations, so if anyone can help towards her running costs, please donate – either as a direct donation or by donating foods, cleaning materials etc.

Hedges and Maybe Fledges?

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It’s been a mixed week with the trail cam this last week or so. We’ve either had two happy successes in the garden or one success and one disappointment and we can’t work out which.  The undecided is our baby blue tits.

We’ve been filming the adults going in and out for a few weeks now. They seemed to be doing a good job feeding the babies and we could hear chicks chirping. Then suddenly about 9am last Wednesday the adults started flying back to the box with caterpillars, stopping, peering in and looking confused. We’d had the trail cam on the box continuously and this was a very marked change in behaviour. For the first couple of mini video clips I thought great – because the adults were hanging around outside, clutching the food which made for much better shots. But after the 20th clip of the same thing, we started to worry. We also couldn’t hear the chicks tweeting any more. There was no evidence on any of the films of predation (next door’s cat had been a likely candidate, but couldn’t reach the box with the chicken wire over it). Could the chicks have all fledged and the camera just missed them leaving the box? Have they just died in the box – why would they, when the parents were doing a good job with the food?  Here are a couple of clips of the confused looking adults.

The adults seem to have stopped using the box now, so we could check to see if there are dead chicks in there, but while we don’t know for sure, there’s still hope that they did fledge and it’s a happy ending. The adults are still feeding in the garden and disappear into various trees, so it could be there are chicks hiding amongst the leaves. There’s a lot of general chirping in our apple tree and next door’s damson tree, so fingers crossed they made it.

The definite happy event is that our hedgehog is back! He or she may have been around for weeks, but as we’ve had the trail cam pointed up for bird activity rather than down on the grass we hadn’t realised. So the upside of the end of the bird box activity was that I tried filming downwards at night instead of up! And lo and behold the hedgehog trundled into view.  The first film is a bit blurry – wrong lens or LED setting or something technical (blame the operator!)

Second attempt is a bit sharper and I’d added a bowl of catfood as a bit of a temptation which seemed to do the trick.

Previous years we’ve had a pair of hedgehogs (but of course no trail cam to record them), so fingers crossed we have two this year too. So hopefully more hedgehog action to come.

If anyone can shed any light on the blue tit behaviour – any thoughts would be much appreciated. It will be disappointing if they’ve fledged and the camera missed it, but not as disappointing as if they didn’t make it at all. One final happy thought though – when up this morning before 5am to empty the moth trap and check the hedgehog cam, I spotted what looked like a pair of Long Tailed Tit chicks in the apple tree – so one happy little bird family in the garden at least.