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Last year I built a make shift hedgehog house in the front garden. Last week there were a couple of young hogs in the front garden and so today I looked at the hedgehog house and snoozing in the entrance was one of the young 'uns!

I'm tickled pink!

Were you in (ahem) hog heaven?

I'll get my coat....

Lee

Great stuff Susie! Hedgehogs are wonderful creatures and increasingly threatened all over Europe.

Last year a hedgehog joke won the prize for the funniest one-liner at the Fringe:

Hedgehogs. Why can't they just share the hedge?

It made me laugh.

Guy

padfield wrote:Great stuff Susie! Hedgehogs are wonderful creatures and increasingly threatened all over Europe.

Last year a hedgehog joke won the prize for the funniest one-liner at the Fringe:

Hedgehogs. Why can't they just share the hedge?

It made me laugh.

Guy

Made me laugh too.

I, too, like hedgehogs. Wish I had some regularly visiting my slug patch, sorry garden. My neighbour has two hedgehog boxes at the bottom of her garden. When she checked them last week, one was occupied by 2 hedgehogs, the other was occupied by a nest ? of bees ! She is now trying to find a bee-keeper who will remove this one box and leave just the hogs. One bee-keeper she contacted told her to take the box to the middle of a wood and leave it there ! I`m not sure whether this was a serious suggestion but not surprisingly the idea of transporting a large box full of bees, in her car and then carrying it into a wood, didn`t really appeal to her ! ( It could have been a honey trap ? Sorry ! ). Anyway, if anyone has any ideas let me know & I`ll pass them on.

Jenks.

To make a butterfly connection to this thread (!), I note that Petiver coined the name 'hog' for what we now call Skippers. Does anyone have any idea how he might have arrived at that name?

I agree that Hedgehogs are fascinating creatures. I remember being woken several years ago by loud squealing noises below the bedroom window. Exploration with a torch revealed two hedgehogs pursuing an elaborate courtship. After about half an hour they suddenly gave up and went their separate ways! On another occasion, there was a loud coughing from inside our garage. For a moment, we thought someone might be sleeping rough in there but, once again, the culprit turned out to be a hedgehog, with a remarkably human-sounding cough!

Mike

Had one "break" into my tent whilst camping on The Garrison, Isles of Scilly. I don't ordinarily mind hedgehogs (and they are meant to be quite tasty, very similar to cat apparently!) but I took exception to this particular individual!

Gibster.

One visited me a few times when I had the moth trap out in the back garden here, it didn't seem at all bothered by me or the light, just very curious.

I had one hibernate in my compost bin - presumably attracted initially by the worms I'd added to digest the compost...

Dave

That must be a cosy place to hibernate. I would have thought it could have got quite warm in there.

Gibster wrote:quite tasty, very similar to cat apparently

Now if that were better known, perhaps cats would not be left to roam around so freely, to foul our gardens and eat our birds. Do you have any recipes?

Mike

MikeOxon wrote:Now if that were better known, perhaps cats would not be left to roam around so freely, to foul our gardens and eat our birds. Do you have any recipes?

Take one cat, stuff it with Grey Squirrels or Parakeets, serve with a side salad of Japanese Knotweed - then pass the recipe to Jamie Oliver and see if he can save the health of our countryside as well as our schoolkids!!!

Maybe he could start with a sharing platter of various crayfish garnished with Himalayan Balsam, the scurge of my local nature reserve.

I was given a big bucket full of american signal crayfish by a warden once. Jolly tasty they were too!

Gibster wrote:

MikeOxon wrote:Now if that were better known, perhaps cats would not be left to roam around so freely, to foul our gardens and eat our birds. Do you have any recipes?

Take one cat, stuff it with Grey Squirrels or Parakeets, serve with a side salad of Japanese Knotweed - then pass the recipe to Jamie Oliver and see if he can save the health of our countryside as well as our schoolkids!!!

Sounds like a job for Heston Blumenthal .....

Many excellent recipe suggestions. If Heston takes them up, we should arrange our get-together at the Fat Duck - though we'll need a subsidy, I suspect.

Mike