Big surprise this morning.
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Cold last night, but 7 bowels of food eaten so the appetites are unaffected.
Mum 2 made an appearance for the first time in over a week. Maybe more interested in the old home than the kids !!
The new Hedeghog highway is getting quite a bit of use which is good.
https://youtu.be/9jk3l9BL01w?list=PLefcZea6pbC_Efx4jHzu4Nl4hQjTGYVuaHouse 2 Mum definitely back. Looks like when Mum leaves the house the kids make for home, and visa versa. Who is in the house at the end of the night, I have no idea.
House 1 continues as normal with Mum and the remaining kids spending a lot of time at the water dishes.
https://youtu.be/hMkpyaIFPmkLatest antics recorded around House 1 and House 2 along with a short clip near one of the feeding stations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I53-Bpicgw
OMG!!!
What has happened to the hoglet covered in paint- I’m guessing.
Do you have any idea who is doing it?
Making my blood boil. Poor hog could be badly affected.Hi alanfrew
It’s lovely to see how big the hoglets have got, so quickly. But I agree with simbo65 – very sad to see that poor hoglet marked like that. What are these people thinking!
You seem to have a female there – the one huffing.
This was the first sighting of this marked hoglet and I had assumed it was a new visitor from far away. However, last nights video showed it going into the house a couple of times. Would a ‘stranger’ do this ?
There are still the normal two hoglets using this house. Mum was not seen last night. I did put the camera out quite late last night and as I was putting it down there was some serious huffing going on from the adjacent house a couple of feet away. Whether Mum is in there or not I don’t know.
As per previous posts we live in a rural area. There are two neighbors to the left of us and I am sure they are not responsible. There a couple of houses further to the left but we have never seen or spoken to any of them. In the past we have seen the odd hedgehog with a line or spot or something which looks like its ‘manmade’, but the numerous markings on this little one is very disturbing and obviously unnecessary. However, I am not in the position of feeling empowered to go around all the properties in the area asking if they are responsible. Ideally, given the generous supply of food and water to be found in our premises this hoglet will decide to relocate into the garden.Hi alanfrew
It’s possible a stranger would try to go into the hog house, but it seems more likely that it’s one of the litter. Especially as earlier on there appeared to be some (slightly less obvious) marks on some of them.
I know what you mean about going round to try to find out who’s responsible. Some people can be very strange, even about hedgehogs. But that hedgehog looked to me as if it may have had two different substances on it, some pale and some dark.
I have had the same problem here. It started a few years ago coincidentally, or otherwise the population has gone down since. One poor hog here had more than half his spines covered in some dark substance in huge blobs. The weekends always seem to be a dangerous time.
But it’s possible that this blobbing is impacting on the hogs social interactions. Hedgehogs have excellent sense of smell and a hog covered in that amount of substance must smell differently. I was studying the hedgehogs visiting my garden for some years before the blobbing started. I noticed a very obvious ‘pecking order’ amongst the males, to the extent that I knew when one arrived, whether he was going to be biffed by the one already there. The aggression was confined to biffing and a bit of pushing along. Everyone seemed to know their place. But when the blobbing started, so too did the full blown fighting. So that hogs which would previously have submitted fought back and hogs were being shaken like terriers with a rat. These fights seemed to always involve at least one blobbed hog.
My concern is that females who are blobbed may become less appealing (due to their smell) and so not produce young. That clearly hasn’t become a problem, at least as yet, where you are! But also females with very small young may pass some of the substance onto them, due to their close proximity and who knows what damage that could do. I have frequently had males arriving who I didn’t recognise, only to realise that they had acquired some dark substance on their faces – presumably from biffing a hog which had been blobbed. At least, I hope these people aren’t marking their faces as well.
I always hope, like you do that the hogs will stay away from danger and just visit here for food, but it doesn’t always happen. What’s even more annoying is that sometimes you will get a hog who has such obvious natural markings that it would be difficult not to be able to identify them by them, but they still get marked regardless. It’s such a selfish thing to do.
I will keep and eye on how things progress. If it looks like the marked hoglet is getting bullied etc then I will try and capture it and take it to Brent Lodge in the hope that they can clean it up. Otherwise I don’t know if the marks will just fade in time anyway ?
The reason I thought it was a ‘stranger’ is that if it was one of the family in this house (as in video) I cannot see how the opportunity came about to mark the hoglet. While it may have wandered off to some distant garden this would have been at night and the chances of anyone coming across it would be quite slim, whereas if it was sleeping in said garden it would be much easily discovered. Although, I guess if someone else was putting out food and monitoring that area they could have found it.
However, I am pretty new to all this so really have no idea.Hi alanfrew
Yes, I suspect it’s people putting out food and if they’re irresponsible enough to exessively mark hogs, I hope they aren’t feeding mealworms as well, which could be another cause of a fall in population.
Normally here the new markings ease off by this time of year. It’s warmer to stay up later in the Summer. And, of course at the weekends people are possibly more likely to stay up later at night. But the marks do eventually seem to fade, although being marked this late in the season it may not be before hibernation and it depends what they’ve been marked with. But I have even seen particular hogs being re-marked with a different pattern, which seems to indicate that the people who marked it didn’t realise that it had been marked previously. Either that or there are more than one different people/groups of people doing the marking. What a horrible thought.
P.S. Hopefully the hoglet will be o.k. with it’s siblings and adults are usually fairly tolerant of hoglets.
Hi, speaking of cameras, I had one a long time before putting it out, but having done so I was very pleased with it and have just re ordered another. They came from ebay for £29 something. They take 4 AA batteries and you need a micro sd card. They have a USB cable and a USB stick to put the card in for better download of pictures. It had over 1,000 pictures on it the first time I brought it in. Best wishes.
Quiet last night, lots of drinking and the only drama came when a hoglet tried to get into the igloo house with a mouthful of bedding, while Mom was resting in the entrance. She did not want to give way, but a hoglet on a mission is pretty determined. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgCpzvx3iMY
Gosh- They have grown!
Lovely watching them do what comes naturally.
I wonder if they will all hibernate.Hi simbo65, yes they have grown quite a bit. The first video captured them when Mom carried two of them to the new home and the other three were a bit wobbly on the ground. Nowadays they are out and about all over the garden and probably into adjacent gardens as well. They do vary slightly in size as they did from day one. Its hard to say how many still use the igloo house, and of course Mom is still in there. I have wooden house which is about 2m from the igloo house (essentially just behind the camera) and I know this is occupied, probably by one of the hoglets from the igloo house.
Just hoping they carry on as they are and are big enough for hibernation. I am away a part of December so they won’t be getting their supplemental food for a while, so I was hoping they might have hibernated before then, but we will have to wait and see.Hi-
We are also away for part of December but don’t have the mass of hedgehogs you have. Only have Big Leg at the moment who I think is trying to hibernate.
When we were away in June I got really worried about the hedgehogs we had visiting at that time especially about water. I was very lucky I had a friend help out.
I bought a gravity fed water thing and a gravity fed food thing.
I set them both up along with a couple of other water bowls (to catch any rainfall) and asked her to visit every 4th day to change the water and add food if it was needed. The food was in a feed station as anything else would have eaten the lot in 1 go. Is this something you could set up? Do you have anyone that could nip in occasionally?
If the hoglets don’t hibernate they may need some food and water- hopefully rain will sort out the latter.
Hope they are still running around keeping you entertained.
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