Re-location!

Yesterday we had a little tidy up in the garden, and I decided to move the hedgehog feeding station and the rubber mat "runway", because it was right in the middle of the patio and not in the most convenient position. So, it's all moved a few feet over to the right and up against the fence. In the photo below in which Elsa is checking over the new arrangement (she likes to be involved) you can see the hedge behind, and in the background of the photo to the left you can just make out the secondary feeding station at the bottom of the garden. I think I'm going to move this a little more to the right too.
We are often told that hedgehogs are creatures governed by habit and routine. I'm not convinced that this is entirely true, and anyway, they didn't seem too confused by the relocation of their facilities here in the garden.
Note the hedgehog feeding from the bowl on the rubber mat. This individual has been visiting regularly in recent weeks. He's distinguishable from the others by the two dark bars on his right shoulder. I'm trying to think of a name for him... Barney, perhaps?




I'm glad to see our blackbird is back! He's hardly had a look-in recently with the wood pigeons and the starlings.

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!

A lone hog early on Sunday morning

It was a quiet night in the garden last night. We seem to have only had the one hedgehog visitor, as seen above.

When daylight arrives, the usual blackbird is on the scene eating up leftover mealworms, and today he's joined by a cheeky starling (who we see entering the hedgehog feeding station at one point):

Friday night's visitors to the garden

... or Saturday morning if you want to be pendantic.





I needn't have worried about the hedgehogs losing their appetite, all the mealworms had been eaten this morning, although - as usual - our feathered friends were there to pick up any leftovers come daylight.


However, in this next picture we see that one clever starling has worked out that there might be more food available inside the hedgehog feeding station.

Elsa decides to put a stop to that kind of behaviour.

Thursday night and some warm weather at last

Last night, seeing as it was warm and dry, I decided to take one of the bowls of mealworms out of the feeding station and position it on the mats where a feeding hedgehog would be captured nicely on the camera. The funny thing is, this morning I checked and all the mealworms in the bowl in the feeding station had been eaten compared with less than half in the bowl outside. I guess the hedgehogs just like - or are used to - eating in the feeding station.

Here are some more of last night's photo captures. You may notice the shape of the pictures is slightly different - I was experimenting with a different pixel setting on the camera and which appears to be more "landscape" in shape.





These next two photos, although very similarly posed, are - I believe - of two different hedgehogs. Compare the markings. The first is Blondie and the second the hedgehog with the cop-out name of "the other one" and who might not be consistently the same "the other one" that I report each time. It's so difficult to tell unless they have particularly distinctive markings.


As ever, the blackbird is there in the morning to get the pickings of the leftover mealworms. This morning he's in for a treat because there's a lot still left in that bowl.

Tuesday night's visitors

Hedgehogs have a reputation of being creatures of habit; they supposedly develop a routine and stick to it from one night to the next. But I'm now realising that it's not as easy to second-guess hedgehogs as I had previously thought. Just when I was thinking that the hogs were no longer putting in an appearance before midnight, last night's still photo captures prove me wrong and show that the first visitor came at 8:52pm.

Below are all the night's (and the morning's) still captures presented in slide show format:

Stills from last night/this morning

Sunday night's visitors

...that is, Sunday night through to Monday morning. In fact, the first hedgehog didn't make an appearance until 12:50am, which is later than they have been most nights.










I feel I still need to play with the camera, positioning, etc, to see if I can further reduce glare. I'm still getting infrared white-out in the centre of the photos. Any tips would be gratefully received. Such are the pitfalls of photographing a nocturnal animal. I have no such problems with the birds in the morning when daylight comes: