I have a small chicken house at the bottom of the garden and use straw as litter. One of my "girls" has gone broody and is sitting on 6 fertile eggs.......... due to hatch the same day as my 1st grand child coincidentally!. Yesterday, I decided to move the three none broody birds in to another enclosure so as not to disturb the broody hen. During this operation I collected straw and filled a sack from the original house to scatter in the new enclosure. All was going to plan until I went back minutes later to fill another. Imagine my shock and then horror when I discovered, lying on the straw, a baby hedgehog, now pecked and a bit bloodied. Moving the straw had disturbed a Sow Hedgehog and her hoglets. They had a lovely nursery nest amongst the straw, and up until this moment had been undetected both by myself and my chickens. I picked up the little hoglet, it had a nasty wound on the head above the (as yet unopened) eye. It was warm and fat with white spines and emerging new dark spines erupting in between. To be honest I didn't give it much hope of survival but, never the less I put it back with mum and it's 3 sibblings.
I quickly grabbed my camera and took a few shots.
I was obviously worried about the disturbance but it was too late for that because disturb them I had. I am really quite upset about this. Hedgehogs are declining in the UK and I havn't seen one in the district all summer. Usually we have one wander through the garden every now and then. The other day I had found some "droppings" which obviously were from this sow
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Having read up on Hedgehogs this morning I now know, and so do you, that the male plays no part in the upbringing and the sow forages locally going back to the hoglets to feed them. I can say that they appeared to be very well fed and fat as little pigs so she must be doing a great job on the slugs in the garden. I plan to put out some cat/dog food for her and perhaps a bowl of Goats Milk. Apparently I share one trait with the hedgehog in that we are both Lactose Intolerant! This will give her an advantage and may help to secure the youngsters survival. I really like the idea of having these wild mammals in my garden. They are the gardeners friend in every way. They eat slugs and other garden pests so who would not want these truly iconic British Mammals living amongst us. The idea of my Blog is to record and share my sightings with the rest of the worls and it is great to be able to do that with you from 77 different countries around the globe so far!
After a few minutes she came out of her ball and showed her head and I kept still knowing that a hedghogs eyesight is poor. She did a couple of circles, sniffing all the time, and then disappeared back under the adjoining shed, obviously her way in and out.
This left the little hoglets who were around 6 days old as their eyes were not yet open and said to do so at a week. I was quite surprised that they differed in size. The pecked one was so much fatter and larger than the other three.
After a minute or so I gathered up all the babies who were already squeaking like baby birds, and felt a little bit cold to the touch. I fashioned some kind of depression in the straw to re-made a kind of nest. I covered them over with more straw and left them well alone.
I was hoping that they would not get too cold beforemum came back, it was a warm day at least. I hoped that mum would come back and suckle them and just carry on as normal. Animals are not stupid though because when I checked few hours later she had been back but taken them off to a new nest somewhere else. This was agreat relief. In the photo below you can see the damage on the head of one of the hoglets.
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