Hi mancunianhogz
I think you need to trust in the wisdom of hedgehogs. You can’t move the hog and if you start adding things it might not be to the hog’s liking. When they build their hibernating nests they are very elaborate. They are designed for being outside, as they would have been before we started providing them with hog houses. They layer the leaves and use grasses to help weaving it all together, but the final construction is pretty waterproof and can be 50 centimetres in diameter. The collection of vegetation in your photo doesn’t look to me like a serious nest – it may be a bit of practice or a temporary nest. It’s a mistake to think that hedgehogs need to be kept warm in the winter. They need their temperature to drop to a certain level to slow their metabolism and they are the experts at knowing how much insulation they need in their nest to achieve that.
As Hedgielover suggests, if you get a hog house and place it somewhere in the area, the hog might decide to make a nest in that. You might like to put a small amount of material (maybe about a handful) i.e. medium sized dried leaves, to give the hog the idea and leave a pile nearby so that the hog can select what it chooses. It might even make use of the pile of vegetation in your photo. But it might start with new materials. So piles of dry leaves are good and also piles of long ornamental grasses.
So I would say don’t interfere with what a hog has already done, but maybe provide a hog house nearby – which, in effect, is a structure within which they can make a nest.
It’s still fairly early for hibernation to start, but might not be long now, especially for the males who tend to hibernate earlier than the females – no hoglet raising duties to worry about!
Good luck.
