Who is eating hedgehog food?

[Pipperrie]

I’ve set up a camera to capture the hedgehogs visiting. I’ve made a feeding station from a plastic box as suggested, and the film shows a cat mooching around but not entering the box. The hedgehog appears to be wandering around the box but not apparently going in, there’s a tiny mouse going in and in the morning there is no cat food left. Is it the mouse eating twice its bodyweight of food, or has the hog sneaked in and not triggered the camera? Don’t know what to do. Any advice?

[alanfrew]

Hi, I guess a starting point is how is your camera set up. For instance I have three cameras and I set them to take 30s clips followed by a 3-5m delay. This means I probably get about 40-70 clips a night which is about 30mins of video per camera. So I know I will miss quite a bit of what goes on, but if I left the cameras with no delay I would probably have 12 hours of footage for each camera and the batteries would need charging daily !!
If your camera is set with no delay then it could be the PIR sensors are not picking up every movement for some reason. You can usually adjust the sensitivity in the set-up, but its camera specific. I have had mice taking individual hog nibbles away, but a bowlful does seem unlikely. I also get birds taking nibbles and/or Calci worms especially crows, starlings, blackbirds and robins (worms only), but this is during daytime.

[Gr8mums]

The mouse that visit our garden does spend a lot of time nipping in and out of the feeding box, it seems to take a piece of food and run away with it. Then comes back for more, but even then I don’t think it could empty a whole bowl in the one night.

[William]

That would be a wood mouse. They take food away to store in its larder. And could empty the bowl in a single night. Could be more than one mouse though.

[Author]

Posts