(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.