The Night Visitor

[Sean Regan]

Let me in!

Not at a quarter to four in the morning!


Hard to see, but Hettie the hedgehog is standing on her little hind legs up against the side of the left-hand window.

 

[oneeye]

Is she a friend or a enemy?

 

[Sean Regan]

Is she a friend or a enemy?

Considering she has two hedgehog houses (one near the house, the other at the bottom of the garden) from which to choose and I leave pellets and water out for her every night. There's a feed station in the foreground which only hedgehogs can access. Another hedgehog is an occasional visitor.

I also use two trail cameras to check on her activity, so she must be a friend.
As it's quite warm and the houses are well insulated, she doesn't sleep in either of them every night.

She can come and go between our garden and the one next door, where the bottom of it is an uncared for jungle, which will offer plenty of protection. I sometimes situate one of cameras to record the comings and goings through the doorway I made, in the concrete base panel of the fence.

She is preparing one house for the winter, it's stuffed full of hay, but she's recently added dry bamboo leaves for additional comfort. The other night she went in and was shortly coming out, accidentally dragging a couple of leaves with her, so she just pulled them back in.

Here she is going in.

You can just see her eye (that tiny bright spot), her head just outside the house doorway as she's pulling the leaves back in.

 

[Sean Regan]

I moved the camera covering the house near the back fence and positioned it to capture the comings and goings through the doorway in the side fence. There's at least two hedgehogs which come and go. Hettie and Stripe, the one with white marks on his spines.
The camera may miss some action, as although movement will trigger it at the moment there's a ten second gap between positive activations. I might reduce that.
So this is what it picked up last night. The activations are time stamped. There's a five hour gap between two lots of recordings.

The camera covering the food station near the house didn't pick up anything

 

[Sean Regan]

The doorway in the side fence is regularly used by the hedgehogs and Marcel the field mouse.
The fox and the cat have looked through it.

But last night the camera caught this.

I decided I wasn't having that. I can't stop cats getting in our garden, but I'll be blowed if I'm going to make it easy for them. This one will have to scale the six-foot fences like any other cat or the fox.

I raised the threshold of the doorway, so now it's just 4.5" high and wide, which will only allow hedgehogs and the mouse through.

 

[Sean Regan]

Success!
The new threshold didn't bother the hedgehogs, they were in and out as usual.
The cat tried to get its stupid head through, but couldn't, so went away.

 

[Sean Regan]

I made a new feeder for the patio with the addition of some key terrain type pipe, donated by a local plumber's merchants yesterday, "as it was for hedgehogs."
I wasn't going to spend a fortune on it as I doubt if it will be in use for more than a month before hibernation. I found a storage box in Asda this morning whilst doing the week's shopping, it was only £4.

These are a pain to cut, which was necessary to insert the end of the plastic pipe, they will split very easily, so I used a fret saw. I used thick black masking tape, to protect the edges of the hole.

Anyway job done. Took about half an hour including tidying the garage after.

The end of the pipe is stepped, so there's an inch or so removed from the base of the pipe, so it sits on the bottom rim of the feeder without moving. The bricks also steady it and the slates on the top will stop cats or foxes trying to get into it.

I think Hettie is back in the house at the bottom of the garden.

This was the first photo the camera took last night. She's coming down the tunnel from the house entrance.

If she'd come through the doorway in the fence, there would be an earlier one. This was taken at 9.00pm. She wouldn't have been "up" before then.

 

[Ernst]

What an outstanding thread!

Bravo!

 

[Sean Regan]

After two tours of inspection the new feeder was found to be acceptable.
The bowl was empty when I checked this morning.

Hettie was busy around the other house, the food was all cleared and "I think she must have drunk a gallon of water," the number of times she visited the water bowl in the space of a few hours.

 

[Sean Regan]

I wasn't happy with the new feeder, I didn't think it would last long with the pipe stuck through the flimsy wall of the cheap plastic box.
So I made an "upgrade."
I hade a bit of Stirling board, so I got to work on it with my jigsaw.

I made pieces for each side of the wall of the box.

This stuff is very cheaply made from bits of wood glued and compressed. It doesn't like water.

So I covered it with strong plastic tape.
With a couple of small brackets bolted to the tube and screwed to the Stirlingboard, it's really secure. No need for the bricks to stop it being moved. Just the tile and brick on top to stop cats or the fox trying to move it.

I had to go to the village hardware/DIY shop for the brackets. Presently, it's the only place for bits and pieces. With Wilko going, the nearest place would be Homebase in Altrincham or B&Q at the Trafford Centre, quite a journey, if you need something when you're in the middle of a job.

Problem is, this little store can be expensive for stuff like screws and bolts as they charge for each individual item. Wilko sold screws by the bag. Fill one with an assortment for about three quid.
This shop has been in the village for fifty years, so must have made the owners a fortune, as it's always busy as are all the other shops, if something closes down which is rare, it's soon replaced with something else.

But they've got competition coming.
On the other side of the road there's a parade of post-war built shops with flats over them. The end one was a double-fronted bookie's. It was formally a bank. But it closed down a few months ago and a new DIY/Hardware store is opening soon.

 

[Sean Regan]

It took Hettie a few days to trust the new feeder.
This is the first time the camera has actually picked her up going in. She's managed to avoid it up until now, although the food had been disappearing.
The pipe is exactly the right size.

 

[Sean Regan]

Hettie is "putting on the pounds," getting ready for hibernation. She makes several visits to this feeder between 10.00pm and 3.00 am. I'm pretty sure she eats all the food at the first visit. I think as the food "magically appears," every evening, she believes if she comes back each time, more might appear.

At other times she's around the house by the back fence where there is more food.
You can see her food bowl, I only half fill it, I wouldn't want her to be entirely dependent on it.

She can get from one feed bowl to the other in 2 minutes, just by walking at her normal slow pace.

We've not seen anything of "Stripe."

 

[Sean Regan]

The security light that covers the patio, came on around 10.00pm this evening when I was in the kitchen, so I was almost in time to catch this.
But it had gone off by the time I reached the French windows with my camera, so had to use flash, but she wasn't bothered.

On subsequent night visits, the trail/cam picks up the sound of her rattling the dish!

 

[Sean Regan]

I was wary of making her too dependent on the food I was providing, but due to the warm weather, I think it'll be a couple of weeks now before she hibernates, so I've upped the volume, she managed to eat it all.

 

[Sean Regan]

Checking the camera cards this morning I noticed the times of the recordings.
On one occasion, there was a difference of just one minute between hedgehog videos on both.

This would mean that.

1,
Hettie had achieved a world record for the 80ft hedgehog sprint! Well.. in hedgehog terms, the equivalent of the 400mtrs!

Or.

2,
We have two hedgehogs!

Sadly it was,

3.
When I took both cameras into the shed and checked the clocks, as I suspected, one I'd set 4 minutes faster than the other. Therefore a difference of 5 minutes between the two sightings.

So I synchronised them.

In actual fact, there's just Hettie and she'd taken her usual brisk walk between the two feeders.