Saturday night and the hog with the bad leg is back

Early hours of Sunday morning: This is the same little hog that came to visit the previous Saturday night - the one I was worried about because I thought she was walking funny. (I say "she" because my feeling is this is a girl hog, but I could be wrong).

This picture illustrates why I was worried about this little hog. Here we see her trying to make a swift exit - but look at the way she's dragging that hind right leg. That can't be right.

I then did something I hadn't done before - I picked her up to have a look. Now, I don't like handling hogs - I don't want to scare them unduly - but I've been reading Hugh Warwick's "A Prickly Affair" and he talks about handling hogs as if it's no big deal. Besides, I wanted to see if I could help her. However, she curled up into a tight ball so I couldn't see her face or any of her limbs, so unfortunately I couldn't inspect her bad leg. Not that I'd know what to do about it anyway, unless it was something obvious like a Post Office rubber band wrapped around it.

I put her back on the ground and left her some mealworms. Here we see her tentatively having a look to see if the coast is clear. Poor little hog.

By the way, she came back again on Sunday night, so she couldn't have been too traumatised by my picking her up the previous night. I watched her very carefully this time and noted that she can move very fast indeed, despite the painful-looking dragging of the right hind leg. She obviously seems able to get around alright. All I can do is keep watching for her, I suppose.

Under the table

For some reason the hogs really seem to like sitting under the garden table behind the grow bags on the patio.

Cheeky Hog

This hog was waiting right outside the back door for me to come out and fill up the hedgehog bowl with mealworms! I swear he was looking through the window. Look at his little face... what a cutie!

It was quite a brave little hog and didn't run away when I went outside to fill the hedgehog bowl with mealworms, and even after I went back for my camera so as to get these pictures, he still didn't run away. Later on he did go around and hide behind one of the large flowerpots and very cheekily peered round the side to look at me as if playing peek-a-boo. I definitely got the impression that this was quite a playful little hog.

Saturday night and a hog with a bad leg visits

Saturday night - I was trying to work out if this hog was injured as it was walking rather awkwardly and seemed to be dragging one of its rear legs. Nevertheless it still moved off quite quickly.

Three hogs visit on Saturday night

Saturday night hogs (4 April 2009): The hogs came running to their food bowl last night whilst I was standing there just 3 feet away. I was amazed - they are normally so shy.

I was just fiddling with the video camera - trying to get the infrared to work, and so long as I was being quiet and not making any sudden movements, the hogs didn't mind me being there. At one point there were three hogs all munching noisily from the bowl of worms. Then I went to get my regular camera to get a shot of this and when I came back just seconds later there were just these two hogs left - a little one and a great big one. (This was when I took the above photo). I think they were starting to get frisky. The little one ran off and went underneath the bike shed and the big one followed but was too fat to squeeze under and it went around the shed looking for somewhere it might squeeze in. Eventually it managed to do so. Then after a few minutes there were lots of grunting and snuffling noises coming from that direction. I assume they were behind the shed at this point as there wouldn't have been any room to do anything with the available headroom beneath the shed.

Please excuse the hog poo in the above photograph - they are messy creatures and the patio needs regular cleaning after their visits.

Hog city

It's been hog city in the garden tonight. I think I've counted four of them.

Hurrah! The hogs are back!

Definitely back! I saw one tucking in to the meal worms last night. It was only little.

I'd been anticipating their emergence from hibernation for a week or two now and had been putting food out for them just in case, and that food has been gone in the morning.

I suspect the birds may have been helping eat it, perhaps before the hogs came out of hibernation, but then last night I saw my first hedgehog of the year.

Introduction

I haven't been feeding hedgehogs for that long now, but it seems like ages already. In fact it's difficult to remember quite how it started.

I suppose it was because we had a water bowl in the garden for my lovely cat, Spock (now sadly departed), who always preferred to drink water outside for some reason. The thing was, all the other neighbourhood animals would also make a beeline to our garden so as to drink from the water bowl, and as well as neighbours' cats, the bowl was visited by an assortment of garden birds in the daytime and - as I soon found out - hedgehogs in the evenings.

We initially started feeding the hogs quite by accident in the summer of 2007. We noticed they liked the mealworms that we put out for the birds to eat, and so we would deliberately scatter mealworms over the patio for "the hedgehog" in the evening.

Note that I say "the hedgehog" in the singular. For quite a while we thought there was only the one - we hadn't considered there were many different hedgehogs visiting. It took sightings of two or three together at the same time to make me realise that it wasn't just a lone hedgehog. And the more I watched out for them, the more I noticed lots of different hogs - big ones, medium-sized ones, and some quite little ones.

Later that summer I decided that the hogs should have their own bowl to feed from, so bought a lovely hedgehog bowl from the National Trust. We soon introduced a second bowl that is usually filled with peanuts and sultanas - which the hogs do like, but they much prefer the mealworms if they can get them.