UK Registered Charity Number 1178929
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What
to do if you find a hedgehog
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The UK has seen a rapid
decline in hedgehogs with numbers falling by about half since the
turn of the century which means hedgehog numbers are likely to
stand at under a million.
In 2020 Hedgehogs were included on the Red List for British
Mammals which means they are now classified as vulnerable to
extinction.
Holderness Hedgehog Hospital (HHH) was set up in 2016 to help
address a shortage of local specialist rescues in the area, as
well as to help educate people on the species.
Our aims are to educate the public and to rescue, rehabilitate
and release as many hedgehogs as possible.
Since 2016 we have grown and grown and after a lot of hard work
we became a charity in the summer of 2018.
We now have a number of satellite rescues within the East Riding
including: Preston, Burton Pidsea and Skeffling.
Everyone involved with HHH is a volunteer, without their
continued support and commitment we would not be able to
continue.
We have 6 assessors who triage and administer lifesaving first aid to hedgehogs that come into the rescue, plus a large group of amazing volunteers.
Our educational talks are very important to us. We have spoken to groups such as schools, scouts, WI and wildlife groups.
These allow us to engage with the public and get them involved in trying to save our prickly friends.
If you would like us to visit your organisation, then please contact us.
Consistent fundraising is important to ensure every hedgehog which comes through the rescue has the best opportunity in life.
HHH is self-funded and we usually host events such as craft fairs, take part in car boots, have regular raffles, have food donation bins in supermarkets and ask local business for support.
What to do if you find a hedgehog that needs help.
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Hedgehogs are hardy little things that will keep going no matter how ill they are or until they collapse.
We receive lots of calls about hedgehogs that are out during the day, have injuries or for advice if a nest is disturbed, when or if to intervene and what to do.
Hedgehogs are nocturnal so they should not be out during the day.
There are a few exceptions such as:
A female with young, she may be moving nest sites, having a break or looking for food.
If this is the case she will be moving with purpose or have young in her mouth.
Some also wake at dusk to look for food or are still about at first light. Young hedgehogs may leave the nest for a short time before returning , again this isn't anything to worry about as long as the hedgehog looks and is acting normally.
It can be very confusing but that's why we are here.
If you are unsure you can call us or your nearest rescue and we will advise you on what to do. (Click here)
If you do see a hedgehog out during the day or you have concerns, remember hedgehogs do not sunbathe and they shouldn't wobble when walking.
If it's trapped, a baby or it has an injury it will need help.
Not all hedgehog issues are visible, they can have an overburden of internal parasites and have a cough or what seems like cold.
If a hedgehog does need rescuing you will need a high sided box as they are very good at climbing and escaping.
Something to cover it such as a towel or fleece and somewhere it can go away from sunlight and flies.
There are diseases that can pass from hedghogs to us and precautions must be taken so gloves, towel or similar should be used to pick the hedgehog up.
Please do not wait to make the call or try to look after them yourself.
We're very excited as we now have our own adoption pack available.
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Click on image for a larger view |
By adopting a hedgehog as a gift or for yourself you will be helping us rescue even more hedgehogs.
Your adoption will last 12 months and for a one off payment of £25 you will receive your adoption card telling you all about your hedgehog's story.
You will also be sent via e-mail, quarterly news letters with updates on their story and helpful tips, advice and other hedgehog stories.
If you would like to adopt a hedgehog please contact us via our e-mail: holdernesshedgehogadoption@gmail.com
What you can do to help and encourage hedgehogs into your garden:
Having hedgehogs visit you is amazing, you get to watch them and you may even be lucky enough for them to make your garden their home.
You may already have visitors but you've just not seen them, look out for signs such as hedgehog poo.
Firstly they need to be able to get access into your garden. Create hedgehog highways between gardens, these need to be the size of a CD case and be made in fences, gates or even walls but have a look around your garden, you may already have them in place, check the gaps under gates etc. Highways allow hedgehogs more opportunity to find food, mates and nesting sites.
Make your garden a sanctuary
Leave a small area of your garden to nature, let the grass grow long and sow wildflower seeds. This provides good coverage for hedgehogs to hide and to nest in plus food from the visiting insects.
Make your garden a safe place by covering drain holes, ensuring there is an escape ramp from ponds and tidy up rubbish that could trap or entangle hedgehogs.
Provide a nesting box: Nesting boxes offer hedgehogs a home to rest during the day, to rear their young and to hibernate during winter. These can be shop bought or home made using what you already have such as: bricks and a paver, a gap under a shed or a wood pile. Make sure it is out of direct sunlight and prevailing winds and place them under shrubs or trees for protection from the weather.
Provide food and water daily
Hedgehogs often struggle to find enough food and water on their nightly forage so providing it daily makes their life a little easier. It’s also a great way to encourage hedgehog visitors into your garden.
Hedgehogs like puppy, dog, kitten and cat tinned food, preferably not fish flavour as they are not keen and often leave it. They prefer jelly and paste tinned food as the gravy type food can give them an upset tummy.
They also like cat or kitten biscuits (not dog biscuits as they can often be too big)
Using a feeding station keeps the food out of the weather and it can also stop other animals such as cats from getting to the food. These can be home made using what you already have: such as a plastic tub, wood or just place under a table or chair.
Do not leave out milk, hedgehogs are lactose intolerant and giving them milk will kill them.
Mealworms are also very harmful: they cause metabolic bone disease and robs the bones of calcium and makes them weak. It causes suffering and will ultimately result in the hedgehog’s death.
Other dangerous foods include sunflower hearts and peanuts.
Bread has no nutritional value at all.
Garden safety
Always check before using a strimmer or lawn mower in long grass or weeds, also check compost heaps before forking over. It only takes a few minutes and it could save a hedgehogs life.
Check before carrying out any major garden work such as removing sheds, decking and landscaping gardens. Hedgehogs don’t always nest in the most appropriate places and love to hide and nest under many things for shelter.
Ensure fruit netting and anything else that could trap a hedgehog is kept up off the ground and stored safely when not in use.
Do not use pesticides, these can kill hedgehogs and other wildlife that eat the poisoned bugs. Slug pellets are also dangerous as the hedgehog can eat the poisoned slug
If you have any questions please ask, we are happy to help and advise you.
HHH is run by volunteers and we wouldn’t be able to continue without them.
If you’d like to be involved, becoming a volunteer is easy: You can be involved as little or as much as you like and all you need to do is request to join our Facebook volunteers page (link here). Please remember to answer the questions and complete the form as it will affect your request if these are left blank.
There are so many ways you can help as a volunteer:
Help with emergency rescues
Become a foster carer (all year or over winter)
Help with transport to the assessors or vets
Fund raise
Help at events
Crafting
Car boots
Cake making
Educational talks
Collection points for food donation bins
Garden checks / advice
Plus so much more.
Spring is in the air and with hedgehogs awake from hibernation now is the ideal time for a bit of a Spring clean of your hedgehog houses and shelters.
It easy to do and shouldn’t take too long. It’s best to do on a nice sunny day and before the hoglet season starts.
Click image for larger view
Soon female hedgehogs will be looking for nesting sites to have and raise their young. A nice clean house will be ideal for this.
Filling the house with clean dry bedding with encourage a hedgehog to use it, you can also leave extra bedding such as leaves nearby so they can add to it. You’d be surprised how much they can cram into the space.
During lock down last year lots of people took the opportunity to tidy or revamp their gardens, as such we had more disturbed nests than ever before.
Hedgehogs think they are safe and have the perfect spot to raise their young but it can turn out not to be the case.
If you are thinking of clearing an area, removing a shed, decking or lighting a bonfire please be careful and check that there isn’t a nest there, they can be very well camouflaged and not easily seen.
If you do disturb a nest DO NOT PANIC, re-cover ASAP, leave alone, go back inside and ring your nearest rescue as they can talk you through what to do.
Hoglet season
has already started in some parts of the country and
unfortunately we will soon start to get calls about disturbed and
abandoned nests.
We often take in hoglets from new born to a few weeks old and
Incubators play a huge part in saving the little hogs lives.
Each year we take in more hoglets and with this years season
about to start we'd like to purchase a larger incubator to help
us help more hoglets.
We'd like to riase £700 so if you can help us achieve please donate and share on social media.
Thank you
Unfortunately Covid-19 has hit us hard: all fund raising events have been cancelled and we, like many other animal rescues are not eligible for support from the government.
During 2020 we rescued almost 600 hedgehogs, 77 of which are staying with us over winter and will be released in spring this year.
That’s an increase of almost 400 hedgehogs compared to 2019.
Hedgehog awareness week 2021!
We'll be sharing lots of information this week so we hope you'll learn something new and please feel free to share interesting facts about hedgehogs:
It's all about
hoglets!
Hedgehog breeding season is in full swing, fingers crossed there
will soon be lots of little hedgehogs running about and helping
add to the population.
Baby hedgehogs, known as hoglets are born after a pregnancy
lasting 4 to 5 weeks.
They can be born any time from May/June and sometimes a second
litter is born in the late summer/ early autumn.
Newborn hoglets
don't have spines (if they did it would be very uncomfortable for
their mum when giving birth!)
There is a layer of fluid under their pink skin and this shrinks
back very soon after birth to reveal their first spines which are
white.
After a day or 2, brown spines start to grow.
There are usually several babies in a litter, they are
approximately the size of the top 2 joints of an adults middle
finger and on average weigh 15 to 20 grams. Hoglets are born with
their eyes and ears closed up.
Their eyes open at around 14 days old, ears unfurl gradually and
their skin darkens.
Hair starts to develop on their head and body at 2 to 3 weeks of
age.
Hoglets wriggle around from a few days old, and are very wobbly
when they start to walk. They soon learn to scuttle around more
quickly.
They feed on milk from their mother and she will stay in the nest
with her babies for the first day or so. After that she will go
out to forage for food. Sometimes this may be during the day and
she will move with a purpose to find food and water.
They can ball up
from an early stage, which is an important defence mechanism to
protect them from predators.
At 3 to 4 weeks old they will start to go out at night with their
mum to learn how to forage for food. They will stay with mum
until they are independent at around 6 weeks old. At this stage
they will be around the size of an orange!
Their normal diet is insects and bugs. We can help young
hedgehogs by providing shallow bowls of water and meaty cat food
and kitten biscuits.
Hoglets may be orphaned if the mother has been killed, or she may
abandon the nest, hedgehog mums don't always choose a sensible
site to nest in and this might result in her being disturbed, one
year a nest was found in a carrier bag!
If a nest is accidentally disturbed,recover and leave alone.
Call us or your nearest rescue who then advise you what to do
next, it is best to wait and observe to see if mum returns. If a
mum feels threatened, she may move her babies to another
nest site.
Abandoned or orphaned hoglets may crawl out of the nest
searching for mum. They will become distressed and make a shrill
squeaking sound, a bit like a smoke alarm.
If you find a hoglet/s that may have been abandoned, please call
us for advice on what to do.
Hoglets that come in to HHH are cared for by our hedgehog
nannies.
It is a full time job during hoglet season and in many ways it is
like caring for a human baby.
They need regular feeds of a specialist milk and are fed with a
1ml syringe with a tiny teat on the end.
This continues during the night for the very young hoglets.
Instead of a nappy change they are carefully 'toileted' as their
mum would do.
Feeding equipment has to be steralisd and there's lots of washing
to do as they are nursed on soft fleece blankets which they poop
on - a lot!!
Up to 2 weeks of age they will be in our incubator to keep them
at a constant warm temperature. They even have soft toys - these
are for them to snuggle under as they would if they were still
with mum.
Their skin can become dry, so they may have a gentle massage with
oil to help.
We use puppy pads in the incubator and cages as their claws grip
better, they slide around too much on newspaper and it can strain
the ligaments in their legs.
As the hoglets grow, they will be weaned into a soft meaty food
at first. It gets very very messy and they often need a quick
wipe over to clean them up, until they learn to clean and groom
themselves.
Once they are feeding independently they may move on to another
foster carer until they are ready for release back into the wild.
We successfully hand reared several litters and individual
hoglets and released them back into the wild.
Raising hoglets should not be attempted by any one was has not
had experience and that doesnt have the support of a rescue.
If you find any young hoglets please do not try to look after
them yourself
- There are 17
species of hedgehogs.
- Hedgehogs are nocturnal, foraging by night and sleeping through
the day.
- Breeding season for European hedgehogs is between April and
November, later babies know has autumn juveniles struggle to
survive with most not making it through the winter.
- Litters are of upto 7 babies normally but occasionally more.
- Babies are called hoglets and are born with soft pink spines
that harden within hours of birth.
- Babies leave the nest for the first time between 3/4 weeks and
follow mum around at night learning to forage for food.
- The life span of a hedgehog is on average 2-4 years but they
can live longer.
- They have 5-7 thousand spines that are up to 1 inch long that
are controlled by a huge muscle along the hedgehog back.
- Hedgehogs have
a rarely seen tail of 1-6cm long.
- Hedgehogs rarely have fleas but when they do they are hedgehog
specific fleas so only live on hedgehogs.
- Hedgehogs are very good swimmers but can occasionally drown in
garden ponds that don’t have easily found escape routes.
- A group of hedgehogs is called an array.
- European hedgehogs hibernate usually between November and March
but don’t hibernate solidly, they wake occasionally for a
snack. Some smaller hedgehogs particularly autumn juveniles
don’t have the body mass to hibernate so struggle on
searching for food over the winter.
- Hedgehogs are 1 of only 3 British mammals that hibernate, the
other 2 been bats and dormice.
- In the Middle Ages hedgehogs where known has urchins and even
have a mention in one of William Shakespeare’s plays.
- Hedgehogs self anoint by rubbing frothy saliva on themselves,
they do this when stimulated by a strong taste or smell.
- Hedgehogs are lactose intolerant so they must never be given
milk.
- They curl into a tight ball when they feel in danger, this
protects the vulnerable area underneath that hasn't any spines.
- Hedgehogs can walk upto 2 miles a night to forage for food or
look for a mate.
- They are called a gardens friend. This is because they eat bugs
and caterpillars which can be a problem when growing fruit
and vegetables.
- Hedgehogs rely on their nose for hunting and foraging for food
as their eye sight isn't very good.
-Hedgehogs have a very varied diet and eat many things including
insects, snails, frogs and toads, snakes and bird eggs,
-They construct a nest called a hibernaculum. During hibernation,
the body temperate drops and they slow their breathing rate. Many
hedgehogs can lose up to a third or more of their body weight
during hibernation and must find food and water quickly when they
wake.
-Hedgehogs have very poor eyesight but have an excellent sense of
smell and hearing. They use both to sniff out and hear their
prey.
-The most common
domesticated hedgehog is the African pygmy hedgehog, which a
hybrid of the white-bellied hedgehog or four-toed hedgehog and
the North African hedgehog.
- Hedgehogs are solitary animals.
-In the UK wild hedgehogs are considered an endangered species
and it is illegal to keep one as a pet.
-Hedgehogs are a fairly vocal animal and can communicate through
a combination of grunts, snuffles and/or squeals, depending on
species.
- Hedgehogs are actually quite fast and can travel up to 3km per
hour.
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Last updated 10/05/2021 09:46
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