Accessibility Homepage Skip navigation Sitemap

Forum

Register and log in to gain access to our forums and chat about everything 'hedgehog'!

Thank you for looking to contribute to the Hedgehog Street forum. Please note that when submitting replies or posts, these are run through our spam-checkers, so there may be a slight delay in your posts appearing, and reflecting in the forum post details below. However, if you think anything has gone awry please contact us.

The views and opinions expressed in this forum do not necessarily represent the views of PTES or BHPS.

Home Forums Hedgehog signs and sightings Our little hog friend of last year hasn't reappeared Reply To: Our little hog friend of last year hasn't reappeared

#6250
Avatar photo
Nic

Hi Annie

I managed to catch rather a lot of me on the cam last night! A hog turned up bleeding, what seemed rather a lot, so I thought the poor chap might need some help. Luckily the bleeding stopped after a bit, but the poor chap is in the kitchen waiting to go to the Wildlife Hospital to get checked over. I don’t normally like interfering, but it looked like a lot of blood for a little hedgehog. This morning, I see that the blood trail isn’t that long, so don’t know what could have happened to cause it. Will have to wait and see what they say. Unfortunately the shed is down the end of the garden, hence me on the cam to-ing and fro-ing to get the old cat basket – now hog carrier!

All this unusual human activity must have frightened the other hogs away, so it was very quiet last night. Just had a quick scan through the cam content and – horror – a rat. The first one caught on the cam, but bad news, as I won’t be able to leave any food out unattended for a while.

The hogs are very funny sometimes when they are scratching – amazing the positions they can get into! That sounds a BIG hog. Maybe someone else was lurking in the undergrowth to make him put his spines up?

I find the best way to id the hogs is to look at them through the binoculars in real time. You can see more detail that way. My cams aren’t really good enough to tell who is who, apart from one or two more obvious ones. If you look carefully, usually the dark parts on the face vary in shape and size a bit and sometimes they have a ‘star’ in the middle, or a v shape coming down from the top, or other ‘blobs’ all these of varying sizes and locations – ie. only down to the eyes, or past them, etc. Some of the ones here are quite similar, especially after last year’s intake of hoglets, so I have to find some small feature which is different. I haven’t got all the youngsters totally worked out yet. Then there’s size, colour of spines. Does your camera do colour or b/w? The night ones here are b/w. The skirts are often useful. I sometimes think of them as a bit of a bar code. The different gradations of dark or light along the length. I need to work on them more, as I think they might show up better on the cams.

That’s very contrary of Frank not using his boxes. By the time he decides to use one, they might have been taken over by hogs! One particular cat here has become annoyingly persistent, although on my quick scan of the cam content there was no sign of him when the rat was around!

Other wildlife here? Just Frog who is nearly always in one of my tub ponds, the birds, of course, the hogs and one rat! Still no sign of the missing girls and the hogs don’t seem to have settled into a routine yet. Often different hogs turn up on different nights – during live watching time, that is.

Hedgehog