Hi Kim,
So sad to hear your story. I think part of the problem is that it only takes one rogue badger to develop a taste for hedgehog and wipe out large numbers. I don’t know if you have been watching the burrowers with Chris Packham, but the badger expert on the show Chris Cheeseman, has counted the number of worms eaten by a badger in a typical two hour feeding session at a staggering 1300… that equates to over 3kg in weight! It doesn’t take much to work out that if the average hedgehog weighs in at around 1kg, a badger could potentially eat more than one per night! On a more positive note, male hedgehogs tend to travel far afield; some of ours have gone AWOL for weeks at a time and then returned. Also, if they sense that there is a hungry badger in the area they will probably keep well away, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that they have all been consumed.
I don’t want to demonise badgers, they have lived alongside hedgehogs for millions of years, the fact that they are now eating hedgehogs is probably because of competition for ever dwindling food resources and habitat. They are being pushed into closer and closer proximity to each other, as more and more of our green and pleasant land disappears under the digger.
I hope your regulars show up soon, keep us posted…
