Our hedgehogs are back!

A couple of years ago we bought a hedgehog house which we placed in our back garden. We were thrilled when the hedgehogs started visiting, and loved watching them on our cameras. But then they suddenly deserted us! We stopped putting out food, and forgot to keep the house clean over the winter.

We have some garden work planned in the next few weeks in the area of the house, and which will also remove one of the entrances to our back garden which we know that hedgehogs sometimes use. So I took the house and gave it a good clean out, filled it with clean straw, and we relocated it to our front garden, tucked away close to our large hedge.

We bought more hedgehog food, set it out along with some water, and to our delight that very same evening we had a hedgehog visitor! I think that they can access our front garden more easily, and it's a very quiet road with minimal traffic at night so they should be quite safe. 

I learned early on that I needed to wait until it was dark before I put the food out. One evening around 7pm I put out some food, and the moment that I shut the door the seagull swooped down and gobbled the lot - it must have been watching me! Then every morning a hopeful magpie appears to eat up any food that has been left. I've been putting the food out about 9.30pm, and the hedgehog is currently arriving at almost exactly the same time each night - just before 10pm.

I'm not a hedgehog expert but it looks like the same hedgehog that is our most frequent visitor. It has stayed overnight in the house once, but usually it just wanders about, coming back to the food bowl multiple times until about 3am. One night we even had two hedgehogs which was exciting.

Most evenings I check in just before I go to bed and there is usually a hedgehog snuffling about that I can watch on the live camera view. We can't see them from the windows because it's so dark, so it's really nice to have the camera to know that they've been there. I'm so glad that we've enticed them back!

Finally I can't resist sharing this photo of the pot by our front door, I think it's lovely! It's just some bedding plants that I bought a few weeks ago, and they have come out in such lovely colours.