July 2020

First, we saw some strange poo round our garden. A few days later we discovered what we thought was a young, hungry hedgehog who came out at twilight. We caught him hoovering up sunflower seeds that had fallen from the bird feeders. At first we were quite worried about it because hedgehogs are nocturnal creatures and don’t generally come out in the daytime. As you will see, we are less worried about him now because he comes out every night and eats like a horse!

Hedgehog scat funky facts!

Size: 1.5–5cm Hedgehog scat is sausage-like in shape, like that of a small carnivore. It is usually shiny and squidgy, and may be tapered at one end. Normally black in colour, hedgehog droppings may contain berry pips and shiny fragments from insect body parts. They look yummy… NOT!

The magpie and the hedgehog were sort of fighting for food… The hedgehog won because of his armour plated spikes. We get lots of wildlife in our garden but more on that later.

This inspired us to have a look what our little Harry (we named our hedgehog Harry) is up to in the night because supposed to be nocturnal. We looked up online what hedgehogs eat and this what we found:

Food that you can feed hedgehogs

• Meat-based cat or dog food

• Specially-made hedgehog food

• Cat biscuits

• As well as providing food, you can put out a shallow dish of water to ensure any visiting hogs stay hydrated.

Snacks

• Banana

• Peanuts, not salted or roasted, these must be in small pieces so granulated/granular/chopped

• Raisins

• Biscuit

• Chicken leftovers but leave the bones in

• Dried Mealworms

We put out some cat biscuits, mealworms and a bowl with water and left it till night fall. In the morning when we checked the food, half of it had gone! Daddy thought it was an elephant but that was silly, I thought it was Harry but I could be wrong because we had no proof. So we decided to buy a wildlife camera trap.

This is one of the pictures we caught.

It turns out that we were both wrong! The cat from up the road had decided the cat biscuits were for him and he enjoyed munching on them! Both of them were happy eating the the biscuits but it wasn’t very good having both cats and hedgehogs eating together as cats EAT hedgehogs!

Kitty gets a fright when the spiky thing decides he has had enough !

Our hedgehogs are NOT camera shy!

Hedgehogs can very noisy when they eat!

We have two hedgehogs munching the Hedgehog food. Watch this video to see them vacuuming up their supper!

Hedgehogs bott!

Wood mice groom each other. The male grooms the female. To escape predators like cats and owls, they let the predators catch them by the tail and that way they can escape The wood mouse is also known as ‘the long-tailed field mouse’ because if you had a wood mouse with no tail the is the size of the tail.

The adorable fluffball is waiting… click on the video to reveal who he is!

This is a naughty invader… click on the video to play the evidence (underneath) That was a close one…

Lots of mice live in our garden. They are sooooooo cute and soooooo quick!

We also have a baby hedgehog. Hedgehogs give birth to four or five hoglets in June and July, but there are usually only two or three that survive. They do not survive because the mother hedgehog can leave the nest or sometimes eats the hoglets, if she is disturbed. See him on this video…