Hedgehogs are no doubt Britain’s favourite mammal - “a gardener’s best friend.” This wonderfully unique and spiny creature is a regular visitor to our gardens, chomping on anything from cat food to beetles and worms. Their round shape, long snouts, and snuffling noises are irresistible to all. But they are in decline, and classed as a priority species and vulnerable to extinction, due to a loss of connected habitats.
The Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Claylands Team have been working with the local communities in Saxlingham Nethergate and Roydon to discover whether or not hedgehogs are present in these villages and surrounding areas. Everyone who signed up to complete a hedgehog survey was given a tunnel, cat food, paper, charcoal and masking tape. These simple items helped us find evidence of hedgehogs (though some volunteers also used their own camera traps to record videos of their hedgehogs). Placing the tunnel by a linear feature such as a fence or hedge-line, cat food is placed in the middle of the tunnel and paper on either side of the food is held down by masking tape. Powdered/crushed charcoal was mixed with oil to create a hedgehog-friendly ink to smear at the opening at each end of the tunnel.
Hedgehog exploring the garden by Elizabeth Dack
The hedgehog will smell the food, walk into the tunnel and through the charcoal ink and leave their footprints on the paper. However, many animals, such as rodents and cats, can wander into the tunnel, making it harder for us to identify the prints. It is important for cats and larger animals wandering into the tunnels to use tent pegs to hold everything down so animals are not harmed and the tunnels will not be damaged.
So far, we have the results from our first survey in Saxlingham Nethergate. Around half of the gardens and small holdings our volunteers surveyed found evidence of hedgehogs being present. Tunnels placed on farmland surrounding the village recorded five instances of hedgehogs after using ten tunnels over five nights in a 1km square. However, it’s unclear whether this is the same hedgehog travelling to each tunnel, which is highly possible, or if a small population lives in the area. Some of the bait was taken by ants, slugs, birds, and cats. There appeared to be little variation in the types of habitats the hedgehogs were found in, being present in gardens and along linear features, which was expected owing to the behaviours of hedgehogs.
Hedgehogs were found outside of the village in the wider countryside, which is positive news, and this is something we were really hoping for, given that recent research (The State of Britain’s Hedgehogs Report, 2022) has indicated that very few hedgehogs live in the wider countryside. In fact, they have declined in the countryside nationally between 30-75% since the year 2000 and most of the declines have been observed in the East of England.
We look forward to receiving and analysing the results of the Roydon village survey. Then we can map the hedgehogs in both areas, evaluate the reasons for local declines, and prioritise actions to support hedgehogs through better connectivity as part of future landscape-scale conservation projects.
Visit the Hedgehog street website for information on how to support hedgehogs in your garden. www.hedgehogstreet.org
Main image by Richard Brunton