June 7th

Posted by on Jun 5, 2013 in Garden Diary, Uncategorized | Comments Off on June 7th

Horace Hotplate update

 

Horace is our hedgehog. I said I would report on how he has been doing and I have been too busy getting the garden ready for you discerning garden visitors! So apologies.

Having brought him into the greenhouse still hibernating, our hedgehog woke from his deep winter sleep and filled his belly twice daily with cat food ( chicken and turkey or cat nuts) Now, he visits either every night or once every two nights. He no longer wants wet food but eats dried fruit and nuts as well as dried cat food and he seems most partial to almonds which I chop roughly first. He drinks much fresh water too. He comes in at around 2 or 3 in the morning. He feeds and wanders around then leaves about 20 minutes later.

How do we know? We bought a wildlife camera by HandyKam. Can’t recommend them enough. It’s relatively inexpensive, and you can place it anywhere you like, take out the card, plug into your computer and there you have your footage to delight over.

Here are two or 3 clips of Horace on his anti meridiem antics.

squeeze!

He dug his way out of the greenhouse initially and we thought we would like to capture him coming in or going out. That’s how we discovered that all this eating was making the journey under the door quite a squeeze. So, we did some more excavating and this made things much easier for the little fellow. We can see he is a boy and we hope he will find himself a girlfriend. We did find a second hibernation hole under another carex ‘Bronze form’.