Thank you so much to Hettihog, simbo65, and Kippy Ben for your helpful messages.
Clearly I have made a beginner’s mistake with the sleeping/eating arrangements for this year, and so cannot properly put it right at present. What I am now planning to do though is to buy a little wooden hedgehog house for sleeping in, ( the hog not me ha ha!) as I have now discovered that some are not as expensive as I thought, and will locate this elsewhere in the garden with some hay in it. I don’t really have anyone to sort out the underbed hole needed, and I quite like the wooden ones anyway.
Then if the little hedgehog goes for a wander this autumn or winter he might find it and decide to move in there instead, or another hedgehog might do (though I sense that there is only one at the moment). It seems that after his recent sleep he DID go for a walk maybe yesterday as my husband found a giant poo on the path as a present for all the food he has been stuffing recently!
I will keep the ‘igloo’ for a feeding station, next Spring when I am able to clean it out after the winter, assuming that the hedgehog stays in there, but I don’t have enough places to move it around.
All the time he had been feeding in there I had been checking it for poos etc, and it had actually stayed pretty clean. This hedgehog seems to be house trained and only left one in there on a couple of occasions. It is set on earth but as it’s got plenty of hay in there, I am assuming that the hedgehog used some of it underneath him, as I guess they have to do with leaves in the wild. I had hoped to put some dry leaves in there, but no sooner than I thought of it, than it began to rain here, and hasn’t stopped for weeks so everything outside has been sopping wet. In fact if it dries up a bit next week the hog may well go for more wanders again before settling down properly.
