Lupin "Mr. Tiggywinkle" Garden Working Hedgie!

Oh sounds terrible eating treats, wandering gardens.. tough job :)
Battling with slugs and snails? It's a job for Mr. Tiggywinkle
As a last resort in her losing battle with slugs and snails, Constance Craig Smith had to call in a rather prickly expert - her own hedgehog

Lupin the hedgehog arrived in our garden after I decided to give up on slug pellets, even the supposedly eco-friendly ones. Hedgehogs are said to have a prodigious appetite for slugs and snails

Having read Beatrix Potter's The Tale Of Mrs Tiggywinkle a few thousand times as a child, I was already a fully paid-up member of the hedgehog fan club, but like most urbanites I hadn't actually seen many of them.

Luckily, there are a number of charities rescuing distressed hedgehogs, and after a bit of internet trawling I came across Wildlife Aid in Surrey, a charity that rehomes injured hedgehogs.In preparation, I bought a fox-proof hedgehog house on eBay for £40 (sites such as sttiggywinkles.org.uk have guides to building your own) and waited for my hedgehog to arrive. Finally, at the end of March, a male hedgehog was handed over to us.

That evening, I went out and checked the box; the food had gone, and so had Lupin. I had a look for him but couldn't see him, then just as I was about to go indoors I spotted one of my cats, Marvey, crouched in a flowerbed, fur bristling, her eyes wide with outrage. When I shone the torch in her direction I saw that Lupin was a few feet away, curled into a tight ball. As I watched, she tiptoed up to him, reached out with her paw, and then leapt backwards. After a few more minutes of hard staring, Marvey got bored with Lupin's lack of response and wandered off. Word must have got around, because Lupin and the cats have co-existed peacefully ever since.

He has quite a fan club locally, and for weeks after he arrived we had small children ringing the doorbell and demanding to see the hedgehog. He may not be cuddly, but he is undeniably cute. 'I think he's lonely,' my young neighbour Joe said the other day. 'You should get another hedgehog.' He's right, of course. Lupin will hibernate in a couple of months, and when he wakes up next spring we will get him a girlfriend. There's certainly room for two in that deluxe hutch. Read the entire article here

egel
Originally uploaded by eldeebee

A Little Hedgie back to "work" :)
MAKE YOUR GARDEN HEDGEHOG-FRIENDLY

Grow plenty of evergreen shrubs; hedgehogs need foliage cover.

Have a woodpile, so they can build a nest under it, and a compost heap to make a place for them to hibernate.

Use flowering hedges instead of fences and walls, to allow hedgehogs to travel from one garden to the next.

Have a source of water, like a pond or bog garden. The sides of the pond should slope so that hedgehogs and other small creatures can get out.

Cover your drains if there's no drain cover - hedgehogs can get trapped in them.

Store netting of all kinds, including football nets, out of harm's way as hedgehogs can get trapped in them.

If you are trimming or cutting long grass, make sure there are no hedgehogs lurking there. Be careful when turning over a compost heap, too.

In the UK: Wildlife Aid in Leatherhead, Surrey, sometimes has hedgehogs available for rehoming. Visit wildlifeaid.org.uk.
Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital, tel: 01844 292292 or visit sttiggywinkles.org.uk.
CRASH Hedgehog Hospital, tel: 01202 699358 or hedgehogs.org.uk.
British Hedgehog Preservation Society, tel: 01584 890801 or britishhedgehogs.org.uk.

In the USA: The International Hedgehog Club http://hedgehogclub.com/