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Hedgehog Day

RJohan said:
Just remember, never give them milk, their stomachs can't take it
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Every time I read this, I wonder, being mammals, how they survive at all.

Being insectivores, I suspect that they may digest starch/carb's rather poorly and that maybe this edict is a consequence of the old instruction to offer bread and milk - milk sop. That in turn would probably have been from times long gone when milk sop was the preferred food to be offered to the sick and infirm.

There used to be one in the garden here that had its clock wrong - it spent ages out and about in the daylight. I happened to drop an egg one day, just as it appeared and it totally ignored that when I offered it to it, so eggs are obviously an aquired, not universal, preference for hedgehogs. (They get a LOT of bad press for eating eggs of ground-nesting birds.)

Maybe they have genes similar to many humans from Asia, who lose the ability to produce lactase as they age?
 
The last breeding population of hedgehogs in Central London is in Regents Park. They're tagged and counted twice a year by volunteers. I've done it a few times working from midnight until the early hours and it's an interesting experience. The weird thing is that they seem to move to different areas of the park from year to year but it's not properly understood why - mysterious little fellas!

https://www.royalparks.org.uk/managing-the-parks/conservation-and-improvement-projects/hedgehogs
 
We love hedgehogs , sometimes find them renovating houses , last one was a mum found in a compost bin ...then we heard lots of squeaking and found several hoglets .took them to a rescue centre in bromsgrove .

Good job we had not starting forking in the compost !!!
 
hifinutt said:
Good job we had not starting forking in the compost !!!
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Yes, I was turning over the compost heap rather vigorously with a fork a couple of springs ago, when I thought ‘what’s that?’... of course, it had thought its best form of protection was to stay rolled up rather than scarpering. I gave it an hour for it to decide life might be safer elsewhere - it had gone when I came back.
 
We have hedgehogs in our neighbourhood. One activist is really crazy about them. When the municipality paved a path in a small "residential" pine grove where they partly live, she along with a zoologist demanded the border-stones of the path are not higher than 5 cm above the ground or path, so the hoglets can climb over it and cross the path. And so it was.
 
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