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11 July 2006

Hedgehog

Can any of you guess what we found in our garden on Sunday night? No, it wasn’t another new Google service (although they do seem to be popping up all over the place recently) – it was a hedgehog!

By coincidence, I’d seen a hedgehog house in B&Q over the weekend and suggested to Suzy that we should buy one in case we ever got a hedgehog in the garden. However, since we’ve never even seen one anywhere near our house we didn’t bother, only to find this little fella wondering around our back garden when we got home:

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We were a little concerned for its well-being as hedgehogs usually only come out when it’s dark and it was still daylight. We already knew we shouldn’t feed it bread and milk, but didn’t know what else we could do to help it. After searching the Internet for a local rescue centre, we found the Voluntary Rescue Centre for Birds and Wildlife website and phoned them for some advice.

Although this hedgehog was quite small (4 to 5 inches long) it could still have been old enough to have offspring, for which it could have been foraging for food. As a result, Midge (who voluntarily runs the Rescue Centre with his wife) suggested that it would be a bad idea to rescue it in case it was going to find its own way back to its family. So, we bought some cat food (no fish varieties allowed for some reason) and put it outside on an ice-cream container lid along with some water.

The hedgehog quickly discovered the food and then ran pretty quickly around our fence into next door’s garden, then right across the middle of their garden into the corner next to their shed. We assumed it was going back to tell its family that it had finally found some food!

After waiting for a family of hedgehogs to return and chasing off a couple of cats, I decided to build a little hedgehog house out of a cardboard box and weigh it down with some bricks so that the cats couldn’t get to the food overnight...

When Monday morning came, the ice-cream container lid had moved towards one of the doorways I’d made and half the food had gone. We assumed some clever cat (or other animal) had managed to carefully put its paw inside the box and dragged the food nearer to the door so it could eat it. Our poor, hungry hedgehogs!

After setting it up again last night, it looks like our hedgehog might have been back, as this time the lid was licked clean!

And everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

Labels: personal, photos

5 Comments

11 July 2006 at 15:55 by  Anonymous  

11 July 2006 at 16:48 by  Anonymous  

16 July 2006 at 03:05 by  Felica  

16 July 2006 at 03:08 by  Felica  

8 October 2006 at 23:11 by  Anonymous