Hi James,
It’s nice to know that someone reads my ramblings. I’m a bit behind with my updates, I’ve been a bit preoccupied with ‘mutant rampaging teenagers’, give me hedgehogs any day…Arghhhh!!!
Yes, those eyes are a bit freaky, but it’s a regular occurrence I’m afraid, the cats lurk in the background waiting for the hogs to uncover the food.
Well, it seems that the constant sparing between the regular boys Simba, Arnie, Boris, Bruno and Enzo has proved a bit much and all five have been AWOL for around the last six weeks. They were replaced for a short while by a couple of equally grumpy males. One of them was so aggressive that I had to stop myself naming him Voldemort. The boys usually dish out the beatings amongst themselves, but this thug was quite happy to knock around the ladies and the young juveniles, something which I have not witnessed before.
TT hasn’t been seen for several weeks, so I assume that she has gone back to full stealth mode now that she doesn’t have any dependant offspring messing up her nightly undercover operations. It’s very easy for the hogs to enter the new feeding station unseen, without triggering the camera so I am assuming that she is still around somewhere, I don’t want to contemplate the alternatives.
Young Nagini returned home just over 4 weeks ago a much rounder 675grams, along with a young male companion Ben. They have since joined forces with Nagini’s brother Draco (in keeping with the Harry Potter theme) and all hell has broken loose, they have certainly been living up to their names. Young Ben has been chasing off the next door neighbour’s cats and other males nearly twice his size, whilst Nagini has been seeing off any male suitors with the loudest huffing that we’ve ever heard. She only has eyes for Ben it seems, the two of them arrive together most evenings and even share the food bowl; something which we rarely see…so sweet!
As I have mentioned on another thread somewhere, I have long suspected that Bruno might be two different hogs and it turns out that I was right, so we now have a Bruno (or we did!) and a very formidable Brenda. Brenda is the hog in the photo above, so that explains why she left the courting couple to it and didn’t try and ‘gate crash’ the party! I am hoping that she has produced some hoglets, because in the last week, she has gone from policing the patio all night and scoffing everything in sight to barely being seen at all. She seems to have adopted TT’s behaviour when she had hoglets, a quick dash out for refreshments whilst the kids are asleep and back through the hedgehog hole in the blink of an eye. I’m certainly not worried about any offspring of Brenda’s reaching hibernation weight if their mother is anything to go by. Fingers crossed for little porkys on the patio very soon…
Here’s a video of their latest antics with young Ben chasing off a cat!
