To ask if you to do just one little thing this evening..

[BooksAreMyOnlyFriends]

Put out some water to help the hedgehogs and other wildlife. My local rescue is inundated with hedgehogs at the moment. Mostly abandoned dehydrated babies. A lot don't make it

Leave food too if you can. Any cheap dry cat food is good. If you have no food, don't worry, just leave water. Leave lots of dishes scattered about your front garden and back garden and remember to fill them before it gets dark.


Other things that can help:

Try and make sure fences have gaps so the hedgehogs can garden hop.

Be careful when gardening and leave plenty of cover for wildlife to escape under.

If at all possible don't use slug pellets and other chemicals around the garden.

But most importantly, get the WATER ready for tonight and help our prickly friends stay healthy and feed their babies ❤

[SpringIsSprung1]

Water and cat food out!

[TamzinGrey]

Bumping this thread as we've had very little rain and hedgehogs are in trouble again through lack of water 😢

[wizzler]

Worth a bump given the weather

[BooksAreMyOnlyFriends]

Survival of the fittest I guess

We sprinkle food all over the lawn and also have a pile outside the back door so we can get a good look at them.

It always amazes me how fast they run! As soon as they are done with food they hot foot it to the end of the garden and disappear. Really funny to watch as the grass is quite long so we can't see their legs, they look like little hovercraft

[RnDm]

I honestly didn't know hedgehog bullies exsisted! Is this normal behaviour? Thinking about it now and reading this thread, maybe he/she was starving 😔

[RnDm]

Got my son to do it 🤣Hopefully this works. Sorry for some reason it has come out really dark and my mum is awful at taking videos 😆 but I love the hedgehog vids so I forgive her. 😁

[AGnu]

You could upload it to YouTube & post the link here?

[RnDm]

Can we not attach videos on MN? I have a recording of the greedy one rolling them away! It's really cute in a 'aww poor hedgies' kinda way 😂

[RnDm]

My mum gets three coming to visit each night! It use to be only two visitors and they would both eat together from a bowl until the third one came along. He bullies them and rolls them away from the food! 😂 So now my mum has to throw the food across the lawn so the other two can eat.
They are adorable little things. 😁 They like scrambled egg too.

Pic is before the third came to the house.

[AGnu]

Yay! It's only recently that I realised our neighbour had blocked up all the spaces under our shared fence so I've got DH to move a slab so there's a little gap under our gate for them. Am impressed with how quickly it found us, given that we live in the middle of a city! We're overhauling part of our garden in the autumn. DC have been begging us for a pond so we're installing a small one with a boggy area around it, a wildflower patch & a couple of small trees/large bushes. We've got a wicker hedgehog house we were given a while ago but I've added a feeding station to our list of things to make. Can't wait for our night vision camera to arrive. I'm obsessed!

[BooksAreMyOnlyFriends]

Yes that looks like hedgehog poo AGnu. Congrats on your new friend

[AGnu]

Try again...

[AGnu]

Something's been eating the food we've been putting out... Also, poos have been appearing in the same vicinity. We took photos but MN isn't letting me post them. We've ordered a night vision camera!

[BooksAreMyOnlyFriends]

Great work everyone 👏. There will be a lot of happy hoggies around thanks to lovely mumsnetters. Rain is forecasted for much of the country tonight, mainly the east I think, but the west is still quite dry so please keep putting water out if you're not getting any rain. Thank you ❤

[BumbleBeeWineGlass]

We get the occasional hogs in our front and back garden, they come and eat the dry dog food we leave out. I will make sure there is extra water tubs out.

My 6 yr old DS is the wildlife guy in our family and requested we nail loads of bottle tops to the fence and he fills them up every day for bees.
We have a bug house too and a billion bastard slugs!

One of my clients has a pond and it has a snake living in it

I am very jealous of anyone who has those little common lizards on their garden, we took the kids to Disney World Florida and they chose to stay on the holiday park site to see how many they could find rather than go in the park! 😅

[ethelfleda]

Oh great idea - will do this OP. Thanks.

[FattyPedalsFuriously0hPipNo]

Good thinking, for foxes too.

[TamzinGrey]

It's dead easy to make a hedgehog feeding station. We've made one of these. Hogs spend all night popping in and out for grub but the neighbourhood cats don't get a look in

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FY6-1rQb294

[AGnu]

We've put our food underneath a propped up roof tile - hopefully that'll stop anything bigger getting to it. DH weighed the bowl before we put it out so we can check in the morning & see if any of it's gone!

[Branster]

Thank you for the reminder. This is by far the best post of the month on MN!

[changingnam]

NRTFT but saw a documentary recently with Steve Backshall and Brian May and it said about filling the water dish with pebbles to stop the water evaporating as quickly. Also a shallow dish so they won't fall in and drown

[BooksAreMyOnlyFriends]

shieldmaidenofrohan

Perfect. We have water on the lawn too. They spend a lot of time foraging in the grass.

shinynewapple

There must be a gap somewhere. A rotten bit if fence that they've pushed through maybe. If they can find some way to squeeze through they will.

[Whyisitsodifficult]

Thanks I’m happy to buy some I just wanted to do something tonight after reading your post, I’ll put some water down. Good work.

[BooksAreMyOnlyFriends]

Whyisitsodifficult

I'm pretty sure the only recommended food is cat/dog biscuits as it's got the nutrients they need. It's very cheap. We use around a box a week, 90p from Asda. Poultry varieties are best. If you don't have any put some on your shopping list. Getting the water out there is the most important thing.

[EmeraldShamrock]

Great post OP. I read it earlier, I went straight out to load up the bird table, I don't think we have hedge hawks, we do get the odd fox in the front.