I’ve had hedgehogs visiting my garden for the last three or four years or even more, one even raised a family in a nest I’d made from a large wire hanging basket, lined inside and out with plastic and covered with thick vegetation. I’ve got two other shop bought houses that haven’t been occupied at all. I have at least four hogs coming into the garden throughout the night because I have four Amazon Blink cameras that are excellent at recording in different parts of the garden. One camera is inside a shed which is where a male has created a large nest under a piece of machinery, not filled with the usual leaves but shredded newspaper which they seem to prefer. He sleeps there every night and is still adding more paper as if there isn’t enough already. I also have another male who is easy to recognise as he has a missing back leg and sometimes he goes into the nest while the other one is in there -oops! There have been at least two females who have been courted, unless its just the one poor female and I know that mating has gone on but I don’t know where the female is nesting.
As far as feeding is concerned, I used to have feeding stations but had to keep adding tunnels, bricks and pipes to them to stop the local cats from getting at the food before the hogs had even come out of their nests. I got fed up and now scatter the dried food around certain places in the garden so the hogs find it when they are doing their pottering about, at least this stops the cats eating it but now it’s foxes as well but there’s always enough to go round. The foxes totally ignore the hogs and I have even seen one shove a hog out of the way to get to the food. I throw a handful of dried food into the shed right next to the nest so the hog always has a snack handy for when it gets up so food near their nest isn’t a problem.
