Several Hedgehog residents

[Emily]

In about April this year, I discovered a hedgehog visiting my garden, so I decided to create a hedgehog feeding station with an old storage box, some water and cat biscuits. The hedgehog found its way to the house on the second night of it being out. I have put down several plant saucers with fresh water in for the hedgehog, I have seen many birds bathing and drinking from them and the occasional cat having a drink. Then in about the middle of May I spotted 2 hedgehogs in my garden when I was putting down some cat biscuits in a dish in the feeding station.

As the time goes on I’ve seen more hedgehog visits to the feeding station on my wildlife camera and gradually more and more hedgehogs in the feeding station at once, first one, then a few weeks later 2 and now 3! There are hog visits separate to when they gather so I’m pretty sure that we have more than 3 hogs visiting the garden. It’s hard to keep track of them all as I don’t know how many are already in the garden that sleep in the garden during the day and how many come in from elsewhere and how they’re getting in so I don’t know the exact population, it could be 3 or it could be 10! There has been a fair amount of fighting of course, a bit of pushing and shoving and so on. I found that they sell hedgehog food in B&M which is full of vitamins and healthy stuff for the hogs and they seem to love it, every morning the food dish is empty when I go to check so I switched to that hedgehog food instead of the cat biscuits. When the hedgehogs are foraging around the garden I often hear them making a cute little sneezing like noise, is that normal? The food does go down pretty quickly as I’ve been gradually increasing the amount of food I put out as the hog population increases which does cost quite a bit. As it is meant to be supplementary to their natural diet I don’t want to put a lot out so that they don’t become dependent on the hedgehog food but then I want to have enough hedgehog food out so that they all get their fair share and it’s not just the first hedgehog there that gobbles it up before anyone else. I also recently discovered with my wildlife camera that there are two hogs living in a quiet plant bed that’s quite overgrown with flowers, bushes a holy tree. There are two hedgehogs that don’t fight with each other and they both get to the feeding station the earliest, both around the same time, could it be the two living in the bed? Is that why their so early (early being around 10pm) and don’t fight I have read that they are solitary animals so I’m not sure. I have been trying to purchase a decent hedgehog house, decent price and quality.

I did order a hedgehog house from Charlie’s but it arrived in bad quality (cracked wood, not been put together very well and so on), so we requested it was sent back but there was hold up with it being collected, then there was a hold up on a refund and it was probably about a 10 week process, it wasn’t great but I have received a refund now so I am able to start looking again. I’m leaning more towards a Hedgehog igloo as they seem suitable, good price, good quality, it would blend into the garden easy enough and so on. Is it to late in the year now to have hedgehogs nesting with young in the garden? Would they nest have young in a hedgehog house? It would be lovely to see a few hoglets around in the garden at night.

One worry I do have is that twice now I have had one of the hogs vomiting by the feeding station, the first time the vomit was made up of the cat food that I was putting out at the beginning then the second was green, slimey liquid, just a small amount but it’s still concerning. I’m not sure if it was the same hog both times and there was a big time gap (probably like 6 weeks) between them. Does anyone have any suggestions to why this is happening? We have a large variety of plants in the garden, could one of them be poisonous to hedgehogs? I read that eucalyptus is poisonous to hedgehogs, we have a eucalyptus tree in the bed where the 2 hedgehogs are sleeping/nesting every night, maybe they ate a slug pellet? We’re trying our best to keep our garden slug pellet free apart from the allotment. Any suggestions would be great.

Thanks

[Nic]

If you are worried about the health of a hedgehog, at any time, you can ring BHPS on 01584 890801 and get contact details of your nearest hedgehog carer/rehabilitator and discuss it with them. You can talk to them and give them better details and they can ask relevant questions which you will have the opportunity to answer.

Re. the hog visits. Many hogs will visit a feeding station multiple times a night, so you might want to try to work out which hog is which. Some tips on identifying from natural markings here:
https://www.hedgehogstreet.org/forums/topic/identifying-hedgehogs-from-their-natural-markings/

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