Hedgehogs, everywhere!

Hi all,

Sorry for the recent inactivity ( I feel like this is all I say now! ) However I do have a valid excuse!

Back in June I collected 3 adult hedgehogs from a rescue centre and released them into my garden, as we don't have any in the area. Anyway, I feed them every night and about a week ago I noticed a hog run past that was half the size of the adults! Knowing they will be hibernating any day now I knew I had to catch the little one and weigh it to see if it was fat enough to hibernate. I ended up catching 4 baby hedgehogs, hoglets. Having weighed them all I found out I made the right decision catching them as they are too small to survive the hibernation.

This left me with the decision to either take them to a rescue centre or to fatten them up myself. With a lot of fantastic advise from people on the Hedgehog Street forums I decided to keep the hoglets. I have the 4 of them living in the house now while I fatten them up! The first night in each of them put on around 40g each! The second night hog 1,2 & 3, each lost about a gram or two, however hog 4 put on 30g! I'm hoping they'll put weight on again tonight, as if they consistently loose weight they will need to go to the rescue centre. I'm hoping they just over pigged the first day and where too full to move the second day! They all look pretty healthy, I have had to remove some ticks from a couple of the hogs, I've actually taken 35ticks out of hog 2, poor little thing! Hopefully when they reach a safe hibernation weight (over 600g) I will be able to release them back into the garden to hibernate.

They're very sweet little animals, a lot of work though! They are extremely messy and smelly! I'm currently cleaning them about 3times a day with spot checks to clean poo. So you can imagine how busy I am with them! This has led to a lack of uploads, but I promise I will try my best to add more. To see funny/cute pictures of the hogs please do keep an eye on my facebook page, as this is where most of the 'snaps' will be uploaded and updates! Here is the link - www.facebook.com/AlannahHawker…

I'm extremely bad with names too, so they're currently 1, 2, 3, & 4! Any name suggestions are welcome, hog 1 is a female and the rest are males.

Anyway, thanks for reading!