Courting, mating, self annointing – Sweetpea’s first night of freedom

[Hedgie Lover]

Collected Sweetpea yesterday evening from the foster carer – she was a hoglet in the autumn, and I rescued her beginning of Nov and went to hospital to get looked after and to get treatment for lungworm.

Then she went out to a foster carer, to overwinter. She was late in hibernating, and only woke up a few weeks ago, but they wanted to feed her up and wait for warm dry weather so that I could leave her release cardboard box out in the garden for a few nights, without getting wet and blown away by wind.

So put the release box in my garden, near an empty hog house. And opened the flap at 9.30pm. She came out, and then found something to eat – possibly a snail, and she spent ages self anointing. Then I went inside as I thought I didn’t want to hang around too much as to disturb her.

Kept coming outside, and she was still self-annointing for a while, popped back inside and then I came out 15 mins later, and there she was with a male, and she seemed happy about him being there.

I first noticed the male at around 10pm, and they were together until I last saw them as 11.45pm.

I saw some mounting, running around the hog house, and getting up to secret business behind it, (a lot of rustling and quiet huffing).

Unfortunately when I checked again at 12.30am both had disappeared. so I don’t know if they left together, or not.

So first night of release, and spent it with a handsome male, thumbs up sweetpea!

[simbo65]

Well done Sweetpea. What a gal!!!
Good luck out there.

[millie]

wow I would love to see that all our hogs are males or females they are not interested in each other at all but good luck Sweetpea 🙂

[Hedgie Lover]

I haven’t seen much action lately, seems like the hogs have gone on exploring, it was busy when the first came out of hibernation, but it’s thinned out a bit, however, the food still gets eaten.

I have seen courting behaviour before, but all of it was unsucessful, the female making a loud hissing noise, before the male runs off. This was the first time I’ve seen a successful pairing.

I wonder if it’s largely to do with the fact that it was Sweetpea’s first night back in the wild, and because she was rescued when she weighed 340g in November, she didn’t know where to go. So I feel that perhaps she didn’t run off as she didn’t know where to run off to, or that she was grateful for some interaction after being in captivity for so long.

I’m just disappointed I missed them when they left my garden, I want to know why they left, (did another male hog arrive?) did Sweetpea follow the male and it carried on for longer in the school grounds – did Sweetpea find a suitable nest or did she make one?

Things that I will never find out, in my mind I wanted Sweetpea to follow the male into his nest, but that’s unlikely given that they are supposed to be solitary, having said that Sweetpea’s foster carer said that this winter, she had two wild hogs in her garden sharing a hog house, one was in the main chamber, and the other slept in the entrance.

Don’t know how they tolerated that.

[Author]

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