By the time April comes around and your outdoor space is waking up to spring sunshine and looking abundant and healthy, you may not notice that not everything in the garden is rosy. April is the month when most hedgehogs will become active again and are desperately trying to build up the body fat lost over the winter.
But according to the Woodland Trust these much-loved British mammals are in trouble and there is one thing gardeners can do to help them. A Woodland Trust spokesperson said: “It’s thought a lack of food may be a factor in the hedgehog’s decline as agricultural intensification and pesticide use have reduced invertebrate numbers. While creepy crawlies are top of the menu, hedgehogs are opportunistic eaters and will munch carrion, fallen fruit and birds’ eggs if they come across them.”
The Trust recommends helping hedgehogs by leaving meat-based cat or dog food or cat biscuits. You can even buy specially-made hedgehog food, but your pet’s food will do just as well.
Just don’t give them milk. Hedgehogs are lactose intolerant and milk can make them ill, so please only offer them water.
It’s not clear how much urban hedgehogs rely on food provided by people, but it’s thought to supplement rather than replace their natural diet.
At the same time, they will be scouting for suitable nesting sites – so it’s well worth building log piles or building or buying a hedgehog house if no natural materials are available.
By May, assuming they had had plenty to eat, things will really hot up in the garden as the mating season gets underway. Keep and ear out for loud snuffling and grunting noises at night. Males will circle around the female, sometimes for hours, trying to persuade her to mate.
The female will be pregnant for around four weeks and normally births a litter of up to four or five hoglets. The mother will forage and return to feed her young when they are too small to leave the nest.
After three or four weeks, the hoglets will join their mother on her foraging trips, quickly learning what is good to eat but still returning to the nest to take their mother’s milk as well. By August they will become independent of their mother and start to explore alone. These animals will live solitary lives without encountering their siblings.
Some mature females may have mated for a second time and thus repeating the events of the last couple of months, however, with their natural diet becoming scarcer in the autumn, late litters will struggle to gain the fat reserves necessary for hibernation and need our help, and they will rely on kind gardeners and helpful humans offering food more than ever.
As the weather begins to get colder, adult hedgehogs will continue to eat as much as possible and begin building their nests ready for hibernation. Most hedgehogs will have begun to hibernate during November and will normally remain in this state until March of the following year.