Naughtiness & a conundrum
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My happy band of anarchic hedgehogs have been doing their thing again. They’ve broken a flower pot, they’ve charged through clematis stems and broken them, they’ve taken to digging holes under my best rose and all the usual naughtiness for which hedgehogs are famous. It’s hard not to feel paranoid at times.
I’ve just cleaned out the vacant house (the other one has a HUGE hog in it) and found therein an unused cable-tie which I knew I’d dropped last autumn but couldn’t find after ages of searching. It obviously made good hibernatorium material since it was neatly included with the hay! so, a nice fresh house awaits the next visitor.
Talking of visitors, I have a conundrum. For three days during last week all the local hogs changed their timetable in sync! For some reason all of them were visiting earlier than usual. I don’t know where all of them live (one male my garden) but they all come from different directions and their usual 9pm-10pm arrival became 8pm-9pm. Was there something on TV that they didn’t want to miss? They’re now back to normal again, in sync with each other.
All very strange, why would they all change habit at the same time and just for 3 days? Ideas on a postcard! It did have a huge advantage for me as I could get my proper camera at them which is always fun. Meet Loretta below:
William, I’m surprised that you haven’t got it all worked out…emergency meetings, that’s what they’ve been up to. Do you really think that that cable tie was just used for bedding material and not stashed away for a more sinister purpose! It’s obvious really, by retrieving that cable tie you’ve messed up their latest plot for the takeover of your garden and world domination, I wonder what other seemingly innocent items of yours they’ve been hiding away, have you thought when you last saw the garden twine or heaven forbid the pruning shears…EeeeK!!!
Oh I’m quite used to them co-ordinating their dastardly plans for world domination but they don’t usually do it earlier in the evening for just 3 days, they normally go into stealth mode in the early hours so I’m still wondering why that happened!
It did give me the chance to see a new insurgent however. Never seen before this small hog (not a baby) is clearly either a ninja stealth hog or an ultra nervous new visitor. I spotted this nose with a HUGE ruff poking out from the asters where it sat motionless watching and waiting for a good 15 minutes before warping across to the Spike’s Dinner then applying the cloaking device and just vanishing. Too dark for a picture by then sadly.
They have indeed been stealing things again. A whole Lupin has disappeared plus they’ve been in the shed and half-inched an extension lead and a pair of pliers. Nervous, me? Nah. Bomb making materials if ever I saw it!
Meanwhile, meet Ginetta, Loretta’s sister and named after the Ginetta race cars at Le Mans this weekend:
Lovely photos Williamc, but don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by their cute and cuddliness, it’s all part of their master plan. One of ours also turned up early last night before I had topped up the rations in the feeding station. I placed some cat biscuits just outside the entrance to tempt it out whilst I eagerly waited with the camera, but it was having none of it. It spent a good 15 minutes throwing the bowls around in temper and only emerged when it was too dark to get a decent photo, not that it mattered anyway, the camera mysteriously refused to cooperate…they must have been using that damn jamming device again!
Your hog photos are lovely to see Williamc. Your ladies look in great condition and have lovely dark faces – cute!
Thanks Jan-Marie but as Penny says, beware of apparent cuteness. They ARE out to take over the world. After moving into this house and finding hedgehogs everywhere it soon became apparent that although I owned the house I do not own the garden, that’s only on loan to me during the day.
Meanwhile, another as yet unnamed visitor last night who clearly enjoyed the Spike’s Dinner that I put out. Running away saying “mmmmyumyumyum”…
you must have a good habitat for them – nice to hear and see you have so many, what a treat. wonder if you will be seeing hoglets / urchins soon?
Not really Jan-Marie, I live a on a big housing estate with a normal back garden approx 10m x 10m. I’ve kept one far corner of it as “theirs” where I have 2 hog houses in shade and I never disturb it. Their food & water is in the middle of the lawn where I can keep an eye on the horrors. They have 5 routes into the back garden from neighbours or the front. It’s pretty much a “normal” estate garden.
According to my neighbour hogs have been around since the estate was built on farmland 20 years ago so there was clearly a large population of them then ( I dread to think what the hogs went through during construction).
Since I moved in this garden has become their operational HQ where they plan their insurrectionist activities and there are rumours of there being huge hedgehog command & control bunker under my lawn where they stash their ill gotten gains and conduct testing of their latest technological advances like transporter beams, warp drives, cloaking devices and cyber warfare.
just goes to show that they will survive in urban areas – as long as people don’t fuss over their gardens to perfection too much.
we also dont have a huge garden – but we do back onto a small wooded area – and we leave gaps under the fences and leave areas of the garden, behind the shed etc – to go pretty much untouched – which seems to encourage them in to the food and water we leave them. we have also overwintered and support released quite a few over the years – and many return for food top ups on and off. This year I tackled the neighbours to support their numbers, showing them what to do etc, and so there are a number of gardens now on our estate with shabby areas and feeding stations set up. Fingers crossed that a joint effort will see an increase in the surviving population we have.
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