Wet Thursday night

Thursday had been very wet all day and into the night, but I decided to put the camera out to see if the hedgehogs still came despite the rain. I put all the food inside the feeding station as the hedgehogs don't tend to like it when it's turned to soup. Captures on the camera were well down with the camera only being triggered 12 times by hedgehogs throughout the night. That's compared to approximately 70 times on a warm night recently.

When daylight came, the camera was triggered a handful of times by the birds that come down to see what scraps of food the hedgehogs had left. Regular readers might remember that I had evidence of one cunning starling that had figured out that it could go inside the feeding station for, possibly, richer pickings. Well, as the following photos show, now it seems they are all at it!

Small hog on Tuesday night

Tuesday night was a busy night for hedgehogs in the garden, with several showing up between 8:30PM and 5:00AM or thereabouts. On hog in particular struck me as being rather small. Too big to be a juvenile at this time in the year, I would have thought, but smaller than I would have expected to have survived the previous harsh winter. Unless possibly it lost a lot of weight during that time.

Monday night's hedgehog slideshow

I set the camera up to capture stills last night, but nearly all the captures were either too reflective with hedgehogs being whited-out or else they were blurred - those hogs can move quickly. However, I've used the all the available captures to create a video slideshow so that you can see the amount of activity in a single night. It looks like there might have been a couple of altercations too when there was more than one hedgehog on the scene at the same time. It looks like there's some argy-bargy at 5:00AM.

The hedgehogs have been getting friendly again...

...and this time I have some (shaky) video footage:

Apologies for the quality of the picture. It seems that the female hedgehog is lying on her back - which answers the age-old question! (Or perhaps not... see the comments!)

Here is the photo of the pair afterwards. I have a feeling the male is waiting for the female to uncurl so they can resume their earlier activity.

Tuesday night hog movie

I'd accidentally set the trail camera so that it took 15 second videos (I usually set it to one minute). However, it worked out quite nicely as we get lots of little snippets of footage of hedgehogs in different positions and doing different things and which makes for quite a lively video. Watch how the first hedgehog reacts when the second one shows up towards the end of the video.

Hedgehogs getting friendly on Sunday night

Uncharacteristicly, two hedgehogs were staying down at the end of the garden tonight rather than coming up to the feeding station on the patio. Here we see one of them drinking rainwater from the trug. Note in the second photo that it has a tick near its left eye. This is the hog that I brought into the house last night to treat for ticks, and that is the tick I couldn't get.

So what were they doing down the end of the garden? It seems something was afoot. Readers of a delicate disposition may want to look away for the next two photos.


I'll guess I'll have to look out for signs of little hoglets in a month or so!

Hedgehog visits on a warm April Saturday night

I was happy to see the hedgehog in the next photo had returned. Earlier in the evening I had brought him into the house because I had seen that the poor thing had ticks on his head and face. Using a Tick Twister I managed to remove two of the horrible little parasites, but there was a third near his eye that I couldn't get to because the hog kept curling up whenever the tick twister went near his face (I can't say I blame him). In the end I decided just to let the hog go; there was no way it was going to let me remove that last tick. In the photo you can make out a shape near its left eye, which is - I believe - the tick. Alas, I didn't take any photos of the hedgehog whilst it was inside the house because my camera battery was being re-charged.

The hog in the next picture appears to be a different individual.





Uh-oh! This next picture shows a hog all curled up. I'd wager that it had just been headbutted by another hedgehog.

Blimey! This blackbird is an early bird!

The Avebury Hedgehogs

Yesterday, I went for a long walk around Avebury in Wiltshire, taking in the now legendary standing stones, the long barrow at West Kennett, and Silbury Hill. My friend promised me that we'd see hedgehogs. However, I didn't realise that he meant these:
To the northeast of the village of Avebury are a series of barrows or tumuli surmounted with beech trees. These are known locally as "hedgehogs".

You can appreciate that the shape isn't unlike that of our spiny little friends.

Friday night's hedgehog in colour!

On a blog devoted to hedgehogs it's difficult to keep things looking interesting - there's a danger of all the posts being too similar in content, but I do try to vary the content of posts as much as I can. Sometimes we have stills, sometimes slideshows and sometimes video content. This year, I'm trying not to go outside with the camera to take colour photographs of the hedgehogs as it unnecesarily scares them away, but tonight I very gently opened the cat flap and took these couple of colour photos. The hedgehog's pose in the second photo is most peculiar, don't you think? (I think it must be Scratchy scratching an itch again!)

Two hogs on Thursday night

There was lots of activity in the garden again this Thursday tonight, and I have photographic evidence of more than one hog at the same time. It looks like they may have been indulging in a little pushing and shoving seeing as the one is tightly curled up.

Lots of hedgehog activity on Wednesday night

All the mealworms and chopped peanuts were eaten last night, which is the first time in a long while. This suggests that there were several visitors last night and not just the one lone hedgehog. There were many camera captures from 8:44pm to 5:03am confirming that it was indeed a busy night. However, infrared flashback or white-out is again being a problem and it's very difficult to tell one hedgehog from another in the above photos. I'm pretty sure the first visitor was (new?) Scratchy, and a later one may have been Blondie. It's strange, however, that I'm not capturing a photo of two hedgehogs visiting at once.

Hedgehog featured on new Royal Mail stamps

http://e-edition.metro.co.uk/2010/04/13/ - p8.

"Scratchy" hedgehog visits again

I've been trying not to take too many hog photos with the colour digital camera this year, but this little hog - who I believe is last night's visitor returned again - didn't seem too concerned by my presence so I thought I could risk a couple of quick shots on zoom.