Steel Kitten

Happy little hedgehogs

You would not believe how much Gonzo and Fozzie have eaten since they arrived. We weighed them this morning and they've put on loads since Thursday night! 

Gonzo - the smaller of the two at 150g - is now 200g and bigger Fozzie - who was 175g - is now 215g.  

This is Fozzie during this morning's weighing session. I clean their cage out every day (you would not believe how much they smell - for the first time ever I've bought an Ambi-Pure plug diffuser and I normally hate fake air fresheners) so they usually wake up briefly at this time to inspect the bowl of new food that I put in and that's when we weigh them. They're a bit sleepy so luckily don't move fast.

After a hard day's napping, we usually bring them down to the living room for tick inspection and treatment. They do have quite the most disgusting fat white tics here and there, so we squirt the tics with cooking oil from a syringe and within a couple of days the tics die of suffocation and drop off. Interestingly, they don't have any fleas, although it wouldn't matter as hedgehog fleas can only live on hedgehogs so they wouldn't affect us or the cats. 

This was me trying to definitely sex Fozzie last night (sorry it's a little dark, but too much light makes them scarper for darkness). We've been swinging backwards and forwards on this topic for a few days. One day we're convinced we have girls, then boys, then back to girls again. Despite me saying clearly on the video that it's a boy, another closer look this morning and the help of a diagram in a book revealed she is a girl. It all looks very similar on a hedgehog - the difference is just how high up on the tummy it all is. And when you have something flailing around it's even more difficult. 

 

This was her tonight finding her way back to her nest after being treated for tics: 

However, we do have a challenge ahead - Fozzie has a baby tic directly under the rim of her eye and getting that off without hurting her is going to be a stressful experience for both her and us. 

A tale of two pogs

Just a quick hedgehog update before I zoom off to get a million and one things done. 

We put the babies in their box and left them in the bathroom for the night with the heating up to about 65 degrees. Martin poked his head round the door this morning at 5am and found it a little hot, not completely unexpected as it is a small room with a really efficient radiator, so he turned the heating down at the thermostat. 

The scene of devastation that greeted me when I opened the door this morning at 7am was unexpected though. I've been told hedgehogs are messy. I thought people were talking droppings. That was the least of the mess this morning. The babies had upturned everything in their box, including food and water bowls, scrunched up the newspaper and chewed a hole through the side of the box. They then had a great adventure scampering round the bathroom leaving a trail of polystyrene and poo before heading back to their box for a contented sleep on top of a mound of soggy fleece and white polystyrene, which is where I found them when I took off the box lid. 

The two are now cleaned up and in a plastic cat box with fresh bedding. Martin is bringing home a second cat carrier today so we can separate them, as hedgehogs become sexually active at a very young age. As we don't yet know the sexes, we could end up with them either fighting or mating so they must have separate quarters. 

Martin has thought up a name for the two of them - Gonzo and Fozzie after two muppet characters - although from what I could see (or rather couldn't see) when one of them uncurled this morning I think one of them might be a Gonzetta. 

I'll post some pics of this mornings antics later on when I have downloaded them, but suffice to say unless they become ill, these two characters are now here to stay for the winter. And as they are only supposed to be given Whiskas pouched kitten food and one pog can eat as much as a cat every day, our shopping bill is going to rocket!

It's hedgehog central here...

(mother on the left, baby on the right)

Well...what a day. After investigating the nest, it seems that the mother had a spiky surprises nestled up with her looking to be the same size as the one I found dead outside the nest. 

While I was out with a client, Martin rang round a few hedgehog carers - including Tiggywinkles - to gather opinions on whether to open the nest and remove the baby or leave it with its mother. Their advice was to remove it as soon as possible as it simply couldn't survive more than a few more weeks. It couldn't hibernate as it doesn't have enough fat reserves to trigger hibernation, so it would end up foraging when there was little food and probably die of starvation and/or cold. Apparently hedgehogs are terrible mothers and just sort of leave them to fend for themselves after six weeks. 

So when I got in, we headed up the garden with a towel ready to wrap up the little baby when we got it out. Martin held up the plywood and shone the torch in on the nest while I gently uncovered the dried grass expecting to see one baby and discovered TWO instead. 

Despite warnings not to handle hedgehogs without gloves, I had no choice but to do so as my gloves were so thick I just couldn't get under them. They were lying on their fronts next to one another and hanging onto the bedding with their paws, so I had to bring up some of their bedding with them. The minute the air hit them they curled up into really tight balls. I was so pleased to see this. Guy couldn't do this because he was too sick. They were lovely and warm too. However, I was none too pleased with the prickles I received doing it. 

We replaced all of the nesting material around the mother and put the plywood and corrugated iron sheet back over the top. The mother didn't move a muscle during all of this.

Once we got them indoors we weighed them and found that they were 150 and 175g, so bigger than the other two although still too small. By the way, that's water in the bottom of the bowl from being washed up, not hedegehog wee. 

I then put them into a light, warm nest of towels and cut up fleece, popped in some kitten food and waited. An hour later the box started moving, as they scuttled and shifted around inside and right now there's the sound of loud scoffing so we're hopeful these two will be ok.

Doing some research online, apparently, the rate of juvenile hedgehog deaths in the UK this year has been double the normal rate and vets are baffled as to why this should be. All post mortems have revealed nothing. 

I wonder whether the unseasonal snow had anything to do with it?

We haven't named these two yet - I think we'll wait for a few days yet and see if they're going to stay with us, but if they are it looks like we'll have two house guests in our bathroom until next May.

Update on Guy

The news is not good. I got up half an hour ago to check on Guy to find he had died in the night. Poor thing - he was just too far gone to survive. 

At least his last few hours were in the warm. For some reason we can't bear to put him in the bin so he'll have a wee burial this evening somewhere nice in the garden.

In the meantime, when it gets light I'm going for a scout round the garden to see if I can find any others in trouble. It was too dark last night to do anything but a cursory check with a torch. 

The trouble with finding them at night is that they really need a vet straight away and all the vets and animal sanctuaries are closed. The only options we have are community carers, but the ones we spoke to were full and besides, usually they can do nothing until they can get them to a vet in the morning. 

It's a real dilemma....

****EDITED AT 7:51AM*****

The death toll has now risen to two. I found another one hidden in some long grass and it looks like this little boy has been dead for a couple of days. However, good news is that i've found the mother. She's curled up in a nest asleep under a big piece of corrugated iron on our rubble heap, so later on Martin and I will lift the corrugated iron and put a ton of hay around the existing nest to insulate it further. 

I don't think she's in hibernation yet, as she's breathing quite fast, so we're also going to set up an undercover feeding station nearby with crushed peanuts and sultanas. Hopefully if there are any more babies we haven't found yet and they've managed to find somewhere warm, this will help them put on some weight (we can't leave down cat food as it will be scoffed by the ridiculous number of felines that roam our garden.) However, if we find some small ones asleep we will be bringing them in the house as they won't have the body fat to survive a winter's hibernation and will be dead by spring. 

To give you an idea of how small the two boys were, I weighed them this morning. Guy was a measly 75g and the one I found this morning was 130g, which I find interesting as that's quite a weight discrepancy if they were from the same litter. The spring hoglets will be over 600g juveniles by now so these must have come from an autumn litter.

Unless of course there's two mothers and two nests.....

...oh bugger. Back out I go. 

Meet Guy (Fawkes) Collins - our baby hedgehog

I'm interrupting this period of non posting to introduce a new member of Collins clan. Martin found this little fella in a semi-comatosed condition lying under the plum tree in the back garden this evening. In honour of Bonfire Night we named him Guy. 

There are very definite rules about hedgehog preservation. 

1. If you find one out in the day, there's something very wrong. Hedgehogs are nocturnal and only come out in the day when sick. ***Updated to add: now we know that nursing mothers also come out to go and sleep in a second nest during the day and get some peace! Don't assume the worst when one is out!***

2. At this time of year, any hedgehog sleeping should be in his or her nest and not out in the open. This little fella was lying under a few fronds of grass at the base of a tree. 

3. A hibernating hedgehog takes a breath every few minutes. Guy is taking about 35 breaths a minute so he's not in hibernation. 

4. A hedgehog needs to be above 600g - or the size of a small football - to survive winter hibernation because it can lose 20% of it's body weight. Guy is the size of a small tennis ball and probably only about 200g and there's no way he could survive.

Whether he survives anyway is another story anyway. He clearly has hypothermia, as he's shaking and disorientated, which unfortunately also causes hedgehog organs to shut down and not start up again. 

I've been trying to syringe some oral hydration fluid into him for a while but he's just not taking it. On the advice of an animal rescue centre, I've put him in the middle of a pile of folded towels on top of a hot water bottle inside a polystyrene box with some cat food. So we just have to see whether he's alive tomorrow or not, but my hopes are not high. 

Such a shame....we've been feeding his mum for most of the year and were looking forward to having her babies in the garden too. I just hope Guy is the only one. I shall be on a pog hunt tomorrow morning to see if there are any more although we may be too late now.