Are you helping hedgehogs in your garden?

No rabbit pie? Close boarded fencing is unattractive and unsociable in my view. I’d rather see hedges. Much better for wildlife and nicer to look at. OK, you’ll have to swap preservative and brush for a hedgetrimmer.

I occasionally see the odd hedgehog when I am out at dusk looking for bats. The last time was between Christmas and New Year and I hope it survived.

That is one of the problems for hedgehogs – they can go through a hole in a forward direction but can get stuck if they try to come out backwards. I was conscious of that when I made the holes in the fences. I made the apertures big enough and positioned them so that they could easily see what was on the other side before entering.

I agree with you, they are quite appealing creatures.

This year I am hoping to complete a landscaping project in the garden and I am building in a hidden space behind some timber baulks where a hedgehog family might like to reside.

I don’t know whether cats are a threat to hedgehogs; there are quite a number around us which patrol the garden and could possibly disturb hedgehogs. Squirrels are another possible interference.

” they can go through a hole in a forward direction but can get stuck if they try to come out backwards.“ . Like porcupine spines apparently. On their surface they have scales facing one direction so they enter your skin easily but, when you try to take them out, the scales resist and you die of infection…… I don’t know if hedgehogs have the same attribute. Nature can be clever, and cruel. I wonder why.

Although we feed the wildlife, at the same time we try not to make them totally dependent on us so they don’t lose their natural instincts to forage for their own food, not easy to do when they seem to know all they have to do is look at you with cuteness or hungry eyes.

Maewyn, can you leave some photos for the new occupants so they can see the enjoyment they can get from encouraging wildlife into the garden and the satisfaction of knowing they are helping in their survival?

I like moles, although never see them. Proud lawn keepers might not. I find it interesting how so many wild birds and animals are frightened of humans – response to long term abuse must be inherited – but not insects, some of whom also do their best to seek us out and persecute us.

There was a vixen that used to visit the house for food regularly and would stand very close to us.

An attractive experience and declining numbers certainly engender popularity. Grace, our author, is too young to remember when hedgehogs were far more common. I remember when water vole were far more common than they are today.

I have memories of a friend who used to attend our volunteer working parties and at the end of the day would fill several large buckets with ‘molehills’, which were used to make potting compost to grow plants to sell for our charity.

Working with biologists who can get excited over the identification and distribution of even the most insignificant species I have learned that we need to do what we can to protect the lot.

I did have a close encounter with a mole but never actually saw him. At our previous house, which was built on very light soil, I was doing some work in the front garden when the ground moved in front of me and I could tell that a mole was excavating a burrow. I was hoping I could catch the mole but it shot back through the tunnel at considerable speed and I wasn’t able to trap it. When I saw the ground moving it did give me quite a fright since it was so sudden and unexpected, although the grassed areas all around had lots of molehills. I had no intention of harming the mole in any way but, obviously, it would have been petrified of being handled so it was just as well that it got away. The odd snake has been fairly alarming too.

Didn’t there used to be a mole in MI6?

You might think so; I couldn’t possibly comment.

A mole made it to our front garden some years ago, but for whatever reason (heavy clay?) didn’t decide to move in permanently and we had just the one molehill.

We have a hedgehog as I’ve caught one on CCTV so will try and post a video link later. 🦔

@DerekP, Bill Haydon, Derek. Fully recounted in the documentary Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, if I remember correctly. Or was he…….. you never can be sure.

We manage, as individuals, to run our everyday lives without spying on our neighbours, colleagues and friends. We don’t, as individual citizens, in the UK, spend large sums arming ourselves to the teeth to protect ourselves against others. I wonder whether we do it as a nation to avoid the usual hindsighters from criticising if things get a bit awry. I’d rather see the huge sums of money spent on constructive projects that would increase the comfort and wealth of the nation, than on potentially destructive white elephants.

Oh dear, sorry to have got carried away. The wildlife in the garden, as I look out, is four pigeons doing not very much but wandering around. I wonder what their purpose is in life? Or, indeed, anyones?

Thanks malcolm, I enjoyed the recent film version of that documentary.

Just off the top off my head, I think Kim Philby was amongst the Soviet spies in MI6 while Antony Blunt held a similar role in MI5. It has been reported that, luckily, their presence their did not compromise either the WW2 British “Double Cross” counterspy operation, which helped to persuade Germany that the main European liberation forces were going to land in the Pas de Calais or our Ultra intelligence from Bletchley Park.

Quite a few of the characters involved in Double Cross seem lived real James Bond style casino and cocktails lifestyles, except that none of them were actually British by birth and without the gun fights and fisticuffs. So the character created by Ian Fleming is less of a fiction that one might at first think.

Homing pigeons also played their part in WW2 intelligence operations, as some were used as couriers for secret messages.

My local pigeons don’t seem to be doing very much other than waiting around, to see when I’ll be putting out more bird seed.

Funny story about moles – we don’t have them in Ireland. Which is a bit embarrassing as a Zoology undergraduate and seeing your first mole hill at the age of 20 and not having a clue what is was!

As a Chemistry undergraduate I was introduced to moles, millimoles and micromoles, but none of the furry type.

I have not seen a single hedgehog since the start of this Conversation. 🙁

@wavechange I found my old school reports and it turns out that moles were not my friend!

Sad to hear you haven’t see a hedgehog but they are probably busy fattening up after hibernation. 🙂

🙂 I will keep looking. Last year I discovered a really good place for bats just a short walk from home.

Now bats I get very excited about! I need to go up into our attic this week to check when a very small leak is coming from and I have high hopes for seeing signs of bats. 🙂

I’ve never seen one close-up but when I used to live near a river I often went for an evening walk with a friend, just to look for bats. I have a bat detector now to add to the fun. If only it was as easy to find hedgehogs locally, but I have some food for them on my next supermarket order.

A few years ago we returned from holiday to find a bat clinging to the brickwork in the open porch. It remained their for 3 days before disappearing. There was no sign of it moving during that time.

Water is the first priority. It’s important not to give them milk because they are lactose-intolerant. (For other reasons, don’t feed ducks with bread.) Specialist foods are available, but these should only supplement their natural diet. Providing food is a good way of spotting wildlife but if it reduces natural foraging it might not help.

There’s always a saucer of water at ground level in the garden.

Perhaps I’ll cultivate some slugs to feed the hedgehogs. What do slugs live on? It looks like they enjoy many of the flowers in our garden including daffodils, narcissi, petunias, begonias and chrysanthemums.

Slugs and snails will eat all sorts of decaying vegetation, so will be very active round compost heaps. They are very important in disposing of organic waste. Slugs are higher up in the pecking order and often get invited out for lunch by thrushes.

@johnward, if you like I’ll happily send you a (large) bag of snails-in-shell from my garden to keep your hedgehog happy. There will be plenty left to devour my crops.

I watched a programme on sewage treatment last night and was pleasantly surprised to see a mobile phone charged off urine, using a bacterial cell, something that does not seem too far off real use to generate electricity on a useful scale, and the discovery of new phages that can be used to destroy nasties that are resistant to antibiotics. That is on top of methane and soil conditioner.

Phage therapy makes use of (bacterio)phages – viruses that infect and destroy bacteria – to treat bacterial infections. It is likely to become increasingly important in what has been dubbed the post-antibiotic era, when many of our existing antibiotics have become useless. Not all harmful bacteria have phages and as we are all aware at present, viral infections are a major problem.

As far as what to feed them – wet dog food is easiest. As @wavechange said never milk but also never bread. Water is good to have in your garden for many animals but be careful about ponds, hedgehogs can get stuck if there isn’t a gentle slope out. They only have wee legs.

Could I use dry dog or cat food, Abby? Wet dog food isn’t very convenient if you don’t have a dog.

Go for dog food and add a bit of water. They should be able to eat the kibble ok (their teeth have evolved to munch the cases of crunchy insects) but they also need the water in wet food. Leave the cat food though. It has amino acids in it that they don’t need. I don’t think it would be bad for them if that is all you have but if you are buying it best to go for dog food. 🙂

I will put dried dog food on the next shopping order and see what I can find. The problem with exploring the garden after dark is that the wood pigeons in the trees become disturbed and make a bit of a racket.

The joys of wood pigeons! As the nights are lighter they will be coming out at dusk so you will be able to put it out then. You can also make a hedgehog cafe if you are worried about foxes and the local moggies.

https://www.hedgehogstreet.org/help-hedgehogs/feed-hedgehogs/

Of course one of the biggest things you can do is make your garden friendly to their natural food source, so no pesticides and keep an area wilder with some dead wood in it.

All the wildlife that visit our garden eat peanuts and sunflower hearts, so if you have those to feed the birds already, try leaving a small pile next to a fence or other edge that hedgehogs might run along, preferably where you can see it.

Peanuts and sunflower hearts are a bit fatty for them but ok sometimes, so if you spot a hedgehog stopping to eat, replace the food with something more suited to their diet.

We have put out special hedgehog food that gets eaten by foxes or cleared up by wood pigeons in the mornings, and hedgehogs have turned their noses up at it and gone for the peanuts. Unless you build specific structures, they will always do what they want with what is available to them.

The difference between what animals like and what is good for them is a very important point. For example, dogs may like chocolate but it’s not wise to feed them with it.

Pet food is best but I would recommend dog food. Cat food has added amino acids that cats need to get from their diets but dogs and hedgehogs don’t need it.

One of my local DIY stores sells hedgehog food alongside its wild bird seed.

This is what makes life so complex these days. We were getting some dog food from the animal supplies warehouse on the retail park the other day and there were no crow bars or monkey wrenches available.

I only recently discovered hedgehog food. I thought it was niche and only sold online but great to hear it is more readily available!

Mike – Did any hoglets appear as a result of these nocturnal weekend trysts?