Houdini the hedgehog

The adventures of a little gangster hog, plus how you can help hedgehogs in the garden.

Houdini’s better side…

Houdini the hedgehog came into our lives one morning last year, when, while watching hedgehog videos in bed with tea, I said to Emma “hang on, what’s that on his leg? Is it a bit of bone?”, and she replied “oh god, it is bone, it’s an actual bit of bone, he’s got no leg”. We watched the video again, with the sound turned up, and then again, and then again. There was no mistaking it: the hog in the video had a missing foot and no flesh at all on his tibia, which he was using as a sort of peg leg. We could hear him making his way around the cement base the shed sits on, where the feeding station is. Tap-tap-tap, went the bony peg-leg, tap-tap-tap.

***Please don’t watch this video if you’re squeamish***

I felt sick. How long had this hedgehog been visiting my garden? And how did he injure his leg? I had visions of him being bitten by a fox or a dog, and then limping his way back to his nest where flies had laid eggs in the wounds and maggots had eaten his rotting flesh until it was healed. Until it was healed? Hedgehogs don’t survive this sort of injury, do they? You don’t just lose a limb and wait for the wound to heal. Perhaps he got it caught in a bit of litter, or garden wire or in between those wooden edging rolls you can buy that are really dangerous for hogs (if you have some in the garden would you consider getting rid of it?) Where was his foot? For how long has he been injured? HOW DID HIS INJURY HEAL? And then, when watching the video for the 100th time, I also started to worry about his nose, some of which appeared to be missing, and his general health, as he was covered in ticks and kept sneezing.

I sent the video to my hedgehog rescue friend Helen, who said she needed to see him, urgently, and I was to catch him ASAP. “Right”, I said. “Great”.

Catching hedgehogs is no fun at all, not least because they are nocturnal and I am not. In fact, these days I’m often in bed by 9. To stay up for a hedgehog is a miserable business, plus additionally miserable because we have a dog who a) is obsessed with hedgehogs and b) wants to be involved in EVERYTHING.

And it was August. And I was busy. And Emma is a spin instructor and gets up at 4.30am most mornings. Staying up to catch a three-legged, missing-nosed and sneezing hedgehog would be extremely disruptive. But I would do it, because I had to.

The first night, to cause the least disturbance to Emma and Tosca, I sat in the garden and waited for him. He’d been turning up on the cameras at around 11pm so I figured I wouldn’t have to wait too long. I have done this before, sitting on the hedgehog feeding station (which is sturdy and made of wood), and waited for the telltale crashing of hedgehogs through the border, most of whom would ignore me sitting on the feeding station and enter it beneath me, and proceed to crunch hedgehog biscuits.

I waited until 11pm, and then 11.30pm, and then midnight. No hedgehog. So I went to bed, resolving to do a better job the following night.

“Any luck?” asked Emma, hopefully.

“Nope”, I replied.

The following night I put my extremely loud and annoying doorbell alarm into the feeding station. This is a clever piece of kit as it alerts you to any movement in a given place, so you can go to bed until the alarm goes off, and then get up to retrieve a rather surprised hedgehog with a mouthful of kitten biscuits. Unfortunately it has no volume control on the ‘alarm’ bit, so wakes the whole house up and makes the dog bark, which wakes the neighbours up. I have tried doing this from bed but it’s too disruptive for Emma, Tos, and both sets of neighbours, so Tos and I slept on the sofa until the alarm went off at around midnight. A slightly less barky Tos and I went and got our hedgehog, and then went to bed.

“We got him!” I exclaimed, joyously.

Emma grunted a sleepy response.

Except we didn’t. Because, obviously, I didn’t want to catch the hedgehog and then keep him in a box in the shed all night, so I made him a den using an old rabbit run, in which I placed the hedgehog box filled with fresh straw, so he could get a nice kip, some food and water, and some pine cones for ‘enrichment’. I popped him in his den, set the camera on him, and then went to bed.

In the morning, I went into the garden to find that he had eaten all of the food I’d left him and then broken out of the cage. I watched a video of him headbutting the wall until he’d made a gap big enough to squeeze through.

Emma swore a lot.

I apologised a lot.

Emma put Tosca in the dog sitters.

The next night, free from the excitement of the dog, I repeated the sofa-alarm-seize operation, and successfully put the hedgehog in the cage, which I had reinforced with bricks and plant pots and an entire log. The next morning, I went into the garden to find that he’d somehow managed to lift the wall of the cage up so he could squeeze beneath it. Can you see, now, why he’s called Houdini?

The next night I locked him in the shed. He ate all of his kitten biscuits, limped around a lot (he had, by this point, ‘lost’ his bony peg-leg), and went to sleep in his little box of straw. Phew.

Neither Helen, nor the vet, nor any of the other rescuers Helen contacted, had ever heard of a hedgehog healing itself after losing a foot, not least with the flesh sealing itself around the bone like Pirate Pants. Houdini was a miracle hog.

I was worried the vet would put him down, but she and Helen agreed that, since he was a good weight and had been managing with this old injury for a while, he would be fine to carry on. So they amputated the last little bit of bone, sewed him up properly, and then let him recuperate with Helen, who removed some 50 ticks and treated a little patch of ringworm.

Three weeks later, I picked him up again. “He’s extremely grumpy”, said Helen, “he wants to be home now”. I released him straight into the garden, where he disappeared into the hedgehog box only to come out at dusk and hot-foot it (as much one can on three legs) out of the garden. He remained absent for a few days (in protest, I assumed), and then turned up again, acting like nothing had happened and ignoring the accessible ramps I had made for him to make his life easier as he made his way round the garden.

He turns up on the cameras most nights, shuffling around on three legs, sneezing, drinking a lot of water. We have since seen him fighting with other males, trying to get off with females, climbing over things that look really uncomfortable, and generally giving zero shits about having three legs. But he’s Houdini, his missing foot injury healed of its own accord, and he escaped ‘hedgehog jail’ twice – of course he gives zero shits. He is, to my mind at least, hard-as nails. He’s a seen-it-all, done-it-all, gangster hog.

And he’s thriving. He made it all the way to Lin’s house in the next road and I had to lend her my camera to make sure it was him and not another mystery hog with a missing leg. Then, recently, he was found in the road by a passerby who tried to take him to the vet in a bucket – luckily my neighbour heard the commotion outside and persuaded them to let her move him into her garden, where she gave him some kitten biscuits and took a photo, which she sent to me.

“Oh that’s Houdini”, I said. Of COURSE he was hanging out in the road.

He has such an unusual nose that he’s really easy to spot, unlike the other hogs, which largely look the same. And he sneezes (likely due to the missing piece of nose), and he walks with a big old limp, obviously. Other, younger three-legged hogs tend to engage their core when moving on three legs, but not Houdini. He just drags his stump around like a bag of dirty washing.

It’s been over a year now. He’s a chunky boy and – apart from another mini-stay at Helen’s to deal with a patch of mange on the side he can’t scratch properly – he has been managing well without intervention by me. I like seeing him on the cameras, I like bumping in to him occasionally on the lawn or by the compost heap. I like knowing he’s out there, knowing he’s doing life well, against the odds. He’s part of our weird little family, and we love him.

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How to help hedgehogs in the garden

Hedgehogs have been in steady decline for years, with the latest State of Britain’s Hedgehogs 2022 report, by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) and The British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS), suggesting they have declined by 30-75 per cent in rural areas since 2000. There are hopeful signs of recovery in urban areas, however, so the more we do for hogs in our towns and cities, the better our chances of halting, or even reversing their declines. I live in a very urban area but have lots of hedgehogs visiting. Why? Because I provide access, grow as much natural food as possible, and supplementary feed them incase natural food is in short supply.

Here are five ways to help hogs in more detail:

1. Provide access

Hedgehogs roam up to 2km each night in search of food, shelter and a mate, so they need to be able to get in and out of gardens. Cut a CD-sized hole in the base of your fence or dig a hole beneath it. You can also cut the lower slats off a wooden garden gate and you can even punch a hole in a brick wall. Talk to your neighbours and ask them to do the same – the more hogs that can travel between gardens, the less they need to walk in the road.

2. Provide food and water

It’s widely assumed that hedgehogs eat slugs and snails and they do – but not nearly as many as we would like them to. In one study, slugs and snails were found to form between just three and six per cent of a hedgehog’s diet. Instead, they mostly eat caterpillars, beetles and earthworms. So the more caterpillar foodplants we can grow (think native plants, long grass, hedges), the more beetle habitats and the more healthy soil we have, the better for hogs. Hedgehogs also drink a lot of water, so always have a shallow bowl of water for them to drink from.

3. Make nesting habitat

A well-made hedgehog box is a fine thing, but natural habitat is always best. I have a huge habitat pile to the side of my shed, which I never touch, and it’s full of hedgehogs. You could also pile up logs, twigs and leaves, which they will find and make use of (these habitats are also great for beetles!). A large, open compost heap is perfect, just don’t stick a fork in it without checking thoroughly, first.

​4. Offer supplementary food

Whatever you do in your garden, it might not be enough as your neighbours, like mine, may have plastic and paving, which doesn’t provide much food for hedgehogs. Make or buy a cat-proof hedgehog feeding station and add a shallow dish of kitten biscuits each night. I add just one handful per night, it’s not a huge amount but it seems to be enough to keep my hogs in good nick. There’s a lot of ‘hedgehog’ food out there but pet food is usually much better quality, and cheaper – make sure meat is listed as the first ingredient. Kitten biscuits are ideal as they’re designed for small mouths. Remember that some hedgehogs don’t hibernate (or can’t hibernate because they aren’t fat enough), so feed all year round, or at least until the food is no longer taken. In winter, I leave a tiny amount of kitten biscuits in the bowl so there’s always something. I put a saucer over the top to stop mice eating them, which a hedgehog can easily push out of the way.

5. Add a hedgehog house

A sturdy hedgehog house can be great for hogs. If you’re buying or making one, make sure the inside space measures around 35cm x 35cm, and it has a height of 20cm. Fill with dry leaves, hay or straw but a hedgehog will add to this to make it homely. Put it in the quietest part of the garden and cover with leaves or logs to make it look and feel as natural as possible.

And please check for hazards: make sure your pond is ‘hedgehog safe’, so ensure it can walk in and out, easily. Dismantle and rebuild bonfires before lighting them (or better still don’t light them and leave them for the hedgehogs), pick up litter, both in your garden and when out and about. Avoid using netting and remove any other hazardous items from your garden.

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A new hedgehog strategy

One last thing: The PTES and BHPS have launched the first ever Hedgehog Strategy, which aims to raise awareness of hedgehogs’ needs, identify key threats and encourage policy makers to consider the lives of hogs in a variety of situations, with the aim of halting their decline. This complements the National Hedgehog Monitoring Programme, launched earlier this year, which will provide data on population changes at a local and national level.

While most of the strategy has been designed for conservation NGOs, councils, farmers, landowners and Government, there’s a lot of take-home for us gardeners.

Such as:

• Creating habitat connectivity in urban areas = hedgehog highways

• Enhancing plant diversity = more caterpillar foodplants

• Raising awareness of the importance of natural invertebrate food = more natural habitats for the things they eat

• Raising awareness of accidental deaths = being more bonfire, pond and netting aware

• Reducing plastics in the environment = ending the trend for plastic grass

• Reducing hedgehogs’ exposure to toxic chemicals = not using slug pellets or pesticides of any form

So not much new stuff here, but a good reminder of what we need to do for hogs, which will hopefully reach a bigger audience. Plus, it’s nice to see the addition of plastic as a problem for hogs, here – in a recent study, 19 per cent of sampled hedgehog poo was found to contain microplastics.

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And finally…

Finally, thank you so much to my new paid subscribers, who are already making this process more manageable. Today’s post has taken the best part of two days to write and record, so paid subscriptions really do help. I am trying to keep my content as accessible as possible, with most posts free for four weeks, but if you would like to support my work then the monthly subscription is as cheap as I could make it. Subscribers get access to the whole archive of posts, plus audio versions of the posts if you’d rather listen to them. And you can grab a signed copy of One Garden Against the World for a fiver. Also something else soon, I just need to work out how to do it. Thank you! Kate :)