Hi TinyTot
Your plans for the garden sound great. It’s useful that you have already planted some hedging. That might also help as a barrier to any pesticides potentially drifting into your garden from the fields.
The next thing is to encourage everyone else in the area to make their gardens wildlife friendly as well. Hedgehogs need many gardens to form a large enough area of habitat – they can travel up to 2 miles a night, so need quite big ranges. But hopefully, when everyone sees how lovely your garden is, they will want their gardens to be wildlife friendly as well.
Regarding the hogs going round and round. You don’t mean going round each other, do you? Because during their ‘courtship’, the male will circle the female, sometimes for hours, whilst she turns round and huffs. It sometimes makes you wonder how they ever manage to have any hoglets when the ‘courtship’ takes so long! But if that is what is happening, it’s good news as it seems likely there are a male and female – so hopefully some hoglets eventually.
Whilst hogs do eat some slugs, they don’t seem, in general, to be especially their favourite food and they only tend to eat the smaller, or medium sized ones. So if there is other potential food around, they may not feel the need to go to the more sluggy areas. But you might find as your garden becomes increasingly wildlife friendly that they might explore further into it – to find beetles, caterpillars, etc. although you may not always see them if they venture into more vegetated areas – but it will be nice to know there is plenty of natural food for them.
Good luck and happy hog/wildlife watching!
