Hi alanfrew
It’s possible a stranger would try to go into the hog house, but it seems more likely that it’s one of the litter. Especially as earlier on there appeared to be some (slightly less obvious) marks on some of them.
I know what you mean about going round to try to find out who’s responsible. Some people can be very strange, even about hedgehogs. But that hedgehog looked to me as if it may have had two different substances on it, some pale and some dark.
I have had the same problem here. It started a few years ago coincidentally, or otherwise the population has gone down since. One poor hog here had more than half his spines covered in some dark substance in huge blobs. The weekends always seem to be a dangerous time.
But it’s possible that this blobbing is impacting on the hogs social interactions. Hedgehogs have excellent sense of smell and a hog covered in that amount of substance must smell differently. I was studying the hedgehogs visiting my garden for some years before the blobbing started. I noticed a very obvious ‘pecking order’ amongst the males, to the extent that I knew when one arrived, whether he was going to be biffed by the one already there. The aggression was confined to biffing and a bit of pushing along. Everyone seemed to know their place. But when the blobbing started, so too did the full blown fighting. So that hogs which would previously have submitted fought back and hogs were being shaken like terriers with a rat. These fights seemed to always involve at least one blobbed hog.
My concern is that females who are blobbed may become less appealing (due to their smell) and so not produce young. That clearly hasn’t become a problem, at least as yet, where you are! But also females with very small young may pass some of the substance onto them, due to their close proximity and who knows what damage that could do. I have frequently had males arriving who I didn’t recognise, only to realise that they had acquired some dark substance on their faces – presumably from biffing a hog which had been blobbed. At least, I hope these people aren’t marking their faces as well.
I always hope, like you do that the hogs will stay away from danger and just visit here for food, but it doesn’t always happen. What’s even more annoying is that sometimes you will get a hog who has such obvious natural markings that it would be difficult not to be able to identify them by them, but they still get marked regardless. It’s such a selfish thing to do.
