As we are moving into spring, now is the time that hedgehogs are coming out of hibernation and looking for food. Hedgehogs are surprisingly quick and can cover many miles in a night, so you may be lucky and have them travelling through your garden.
There are several ways to tell if you have hedgehogs in your garden.
Droppings: Hedgehog poo is black, about the size of your little finger, and often contains beetle exoskeletons.
Footprints: A DIY hedgehog footprint tunnel with food and an ink pad can reveal their tiny hand-like prints.
Sounds: Hedgehogs make snuffling noises and rustle through leaves after dark.
The first sign is usually their poo. Hedgehog poo is about the size of your little finger and is usually black in colour. It is rough in texture, as it is often full of beetle exoskeletons.
Another way of checking is to make a hedgehog footprint tunnel, a search on the internet will give you many examples, this is usually a triangular tunnel, sized to be just big enough for a hedgehog to walk through, with food placed in the middle and some way of capturing the footprints, like flour or an ink pad. Hedgehog footprints are quite distinctive and look a little like tiny human handprints.
If you have a lot of hedgehog activity in your area, just popping into your garden each evening after dark and listening can find them. Hedgehogs make a distinctive snuffling noise, and you can often hear them rustling through leaves and lose earth under hedges. It’s a pleasant thing to do, to stand in your garden each evening for a few minutes before bed and listen.
If you want to get a little more technical, you could invest in a wildlife camera. These are waterproof cameras that you leave outside, they have a heat sensing motion sensor, infrared lights and a camera to capture pictures and videos in the dark. The camera is triggered when something warm moves in front of the camera. If you look online, and search for “wildlife cameras”, or “trail cameras”, you will find many options from £30 to £300! To start it is best to find one that is at the lower end of your price range but has good reviews, you’re not filming for an Attenborough wildlife series yet, just looking to see what’s lurking around your garden at night. Place the camera looking at an area you suspect is frequented by hedgehogs, maybe where you have found some poo, or if you have a source of water in your garden, like a pond. Reviewing your captured images and videos is great fun but be prepared for seeing lots of cats!
How to Help Hedgehogs:
Provide Water & Food: A shallow water bowl and dry cat food (or hedgehog food) in a protected feeding station can support them.
Create Natural Habitats: Leave piles of leaves and twigs, avoid over-tidying, and let a patch of grass grow wild.
Build Hedgehog Highways: Cut 13cm x 13cm holes in fences to allow hedgehogs to roam freely.
Offer Shelters: A hedgehog house in a quiet, sheltered spot can help them nest or hibernate.
The first and easiest thing to do is to provide water, this doesn’t just help hedgehogs, but all wildlife. Any shallow bowl, a couple of centimetres deep will do. If it is light, weigh it down in the middle with a rock or brick. A water bowl is also a perfect place for your wildlife camera. Providing food is a great way to help hedgehogs, but there are a few considerations. You can buy dedicated hedgehog food, however, to start with, dry cat food is a great substitute. You may hear that hedgehogs like meal worms, which they do, however, too many is bad for them, only provide a few with other food. It is important to place the food in a location that only hedgehogs can get at, otherwise you will be encouraging foxes or your neighbours’ cats to eat the food instead.
A box with an entrance of 13cm by 13cm is best, ideally with a switch-back so that larger animals cannot reach in to get at the food or the hedgehogs. My first hedgehog feeder was just some breezeblocks arranged for the walls with a flagstone on top. It doesn’t need to be comfy, just dry and inaccessible to larger animals. Once you have regular visitors, you can upgrade to something a bit nicer.
While providing dedicated food for hedgehogs is great, it is also good to provide areas of your garden that encourage hedgehogs natural diet, such as beetles and grubs. If you have hedges, don’t tidy underneath them, leave the piles of leaves and sticks, as it’s a perfect habitat for hedgehog prey. Setting aside an area of grass that you don’t mow is also good and will also encourage a wide range of wildlife to your garden.
As hedgehogs can travel reasonable distances in a night, it is important to provide them with ways to get into your garden. The more yours and your neighbours’ gardens are linked up, the better hedgehogs can travel around looking for food and a mate. To do this, make holes at ground level in your garden boundaries, ideally linking into each neighbour’s garden. The ideal size hole is 13cm x 13cm.
You can also provide housing for hedgehogs. During the summer, hedgehogs are happy to sleep in a pile of leaves under a hedge, but to hibernate or raise hoglets, they look for something a little more substantial. You can find plans online to build your own, look for a design from a reputable animal charity like The Wildlife Trust, or you can buy one ready built. Generally, they are a box with either a narrow tunnel or switchback and a base raised off the ground. Avoid the wicker “igloo” designs, as hedgehogs can get trapped in them if their spines get caught on the supporting wire mesh. Place your hedgehog house in a quiet, sheltered corner of your garden like under a hedge.
Do not look in the box, as you may disturb a hedgehog hibernating or raising hoglets. You only need to clean them out once a year, ideally at the end of the summer, when hedgehogs are least likely to be using them. If you have a wildlife camera, use it to check for activity for a few days before you clean it out. You can fill the box with straw if you like, but hedgehogs will happily fill it with leaves themselves if you don’t.
The only native predator of hedgehogs are badgers, which don’t tend to frequent the urban environment. Foxes are not strong enough to unroll a curled-up hedgehog, so tend to leave them alone. Cats find hedgehogs interesting but again can’t easily harm them so cause no issue. Dogs, however, can be powerful enough to injure hedgehogs, so it is best not to let them roam a garden unsupervised after dark.
Roads are the biggest danger to hedgehogs, which is one of the many reasons why providing links between gardens is so important.
If you find an injured hedgehog, pick it up with garden gloves, and place it in a large high sided box (hedgehogs are surprisingly good climbers). Provide a little food and water, along with somewhere for it to hide, like newspaper, or an old towel if it’s cold. Then contact your nearest wildlife hospital for further instructions. You can call the British Hedgehog Preservation Society on 01584 890 801 to get the contact details of your nearest hedgehog rescue centre.
For further information on hedgehogs, a great place to start is the British Hedgehog Preservation Society www.britishhedgehogs.org.uk, they are one of our longest running hedgehog charities and have a lot of information on how to help hedgehogs.
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