UKNatureBlog

Our recent Hedgehog feeding turned up a surprise this evening. Just an hour after the Hedgehog had been seen chowing down at 9pm as per usual, a rather mangy looking Fox turned up! That was rather a shock, though we had suspected a Fox uses the garden since we'd seen what I was fairly sure were Fox paw-prints in the snow. Actually that paw-print post is one of the most popular on this blog with lots of incoming search hits whenever it snows somewhere in the UK, so I assume that plenty of people have foxes in their garden that only become apparent when the white stuff betrays their presence.

You can see in the rather poor photo that it's lacking fur on its rear and the base of the tail (and an extremely long tail it is) and the rear legs look a bit shaky too. I looked up "Fox mange" and apparently it is fairly classic for this parasitic infection to begin around that area, however moulting foxes in the Spring can be confused as having mange. I'm really not sure which would be the case here. Would anybody out there care to venture an opinion?

The saga of the Hedgehog continues in our garden! It seems that anytime between 9-11pm there's a fair likelihood that if we turn on the garden floodlight we'll see Hedgey either wandering around the lawn or at the food bowl. Late yesterday next door's cat prowled on up to take a look and I watched motionless to see what would happen. Nothing. This cat, which chases down everything from bees to birds and squirrels, simply had a cautious sniff. Didn't even bat it with a paw. I suspect it's been burned before! The Hedgehog didn't give the slightest indication that it even knew the cat was there. I rather expected it to at least run away or curl up into a spiky ball.

I think this hedgehog probably lives under our decking as there's a gap at the side and tonight Hedgey beetled off to that same corner. I've seen the cat poking around there before, in that manner that they do when they're trying to get at another animal, like a mouse behind the sofa. That's probably where it had a previous run in and decided it didn't like Hedgehogs. Which set me thinking – I wonder if the great decking boom of the 90s, fuelled by TV garden makeover shows has handily provided a load of great Hedgehog homes? That said, I suspect people prefer to plug any gaps for fear of vermin, so maybe not.

It's not very often that I get to tick the "Mammals" category when filing a blog post. They're just that much harder to find compared to birds and insects! But special efforts bring special rewards. I mentioned in my last post a couple of days ago that we were going to put out some food to see if we can lure the hedgehogs that we're fairly sure use our garden, having regularly seen droppings on the lawn. This tactic paid dividends immediately, with the food disappearing the first night (but it could have been next door's cat) then proof positive when we observed the little ball of spines above feeding on the next two nights. It's been bang on 9pm on both occasions, though I think that turning the outside light on scared it off before it finished so we'll leave it be from here on.

The food itself is special Hedgehog food sourced from a local garden centre. Feeding them the 'traditional' bread and milk is actually not a good idea as it gives them diarrhoea. Their usual intake is beetles, worms, slugs and snails, so they are very much carnivorous. I hope it breeds as I still have a surplus of slugs and snails eating my plants!