Hello from Bury St Edmunds
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Hi, just wanted to say thanks for this forum. I came here with a lot of questions and I am pretty sure I now have answers.
We are really excited to have hedgehogs in our garden. We first noticed back in 2022 when there seemed to be less slugs and snails. I know hedgehogs don’t eat them but whatever it is they do eat seems to have resulted in a big drop in mollusc numbers – great news for my plants.
We were dead excited because we live in a little triangle of land, there are only 3 houses on it, and we are surrounded by busy roads on all three sides. We had looked at adopting a hog but couldn’t because we only have half an acre of garden and I suspect that even with our neighbours’ plots it only adds up to an acre, tops and the folks we approached said that wasn’t enough to support one.
We discovered our hog was a very pregnant lady hog and she proceeded to have three babies. We cristened her ‘Spiny Norma’. One got lost when she and the others went to the other side of the house. It cried piteously all night and into the next day so we ended up taking him to a rescue. As far as I know the other two survived happily. The lady at the rescue told us there were many, many hogs in Bury St Edmunds, which is where we live. Our garden is quite large for city standards, and there are lots of houses with much smaller gardens but I guess we all have rickety fences as they seem to be happily accessing the whole area. I’ve seen Norma squeezing herself under next door’s gate. She also squeezes under ours. I suspect they go through the fences between our three gardens and into other gardens in the area.
Last year, Spiny Norma had another three hoglets. She left one of them behind, too, in exactly the same place but by that stage, we’d spent a year keeping an eye on her so when we heard it yelling, I just carried it round to where I knew she’d be going next and they all met up again. They are very tame. If we are sitting out on summer evenings, they come out and trundle round the edges of the patio. Last year we started feeding them kitten kibbles, I’ve since bought some hedgehog food because it’s a bit cheaper and comes in much bigger bags.
This year, there are at least three adults; Spiny Norma and a selection of smaller ones. I can’t work out if it’s three or five smaller ones though. Norma often appears with two and then there are three others, or possibly those two come back with a third smaller one.
There is a fair bit of snuffling and circling going on so I think somebody may well end up pregnant again. Although the two times I’ve seen it happen, I’m pretty sure that while one was Spiny Norma, the second was too small. Norma is nearly twice the size of the others.
We’ve just got a wildlife camera and I have some lovely shots of them all eating the food we put out. So far I’ve been providing several sittings but I will try putting food in a different place, too. There doesn’t seem to be any argy-bargy. They all get along, they just eat A LOT. I’m wondering if the two smaller ones who appear regularly with Norma might possibly be last year’s children? Not sure. So far we have only named Norma because while her distinctive size marks her out, we can’t tell the others apart.
Anyway, there you go. That’s our hogs.
Hi Sweary
It’s lovely to hear about the hogs there – sounds like endless fun watching them! It’s great that you’ve had a succession of hoglets, even if some sound a bit prone to getting into trouble!
It’s possible some of the smaller hogs are last years young. I found, here, when I was studying them more carefully some years ago, that the young males tended to gradually move on but the females tended to hang around. The dominant male didn’t stay dominant for more than a couple of years so it all seemed to make sense to avoid inter-breeding.
Norma sounds a real character – fingers crossed for more hoglets this year. Let us know how things go.
Good luck and happy hog watching!
p.s. Hogs will eat slugs, but the smaller ones. The big ones are a bit too difficult for their little mouths.
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