05 May 2025
It’s Hedgehog Awareness Week between May 4-10 and probably everyone is aware of how Britain’s favourite mammal is in trouble.
The hedgehog was red-listed as ‘Vulnerable to Extinction’ in 2020, and their numbers continue to dwindle. In the 1950s there were estimated to be around 50 million hedgehogs in Britain, now there are under a million. The number of hedgehogs in the countryside has declined significantly in the last couple of decades. Intensive mono-culture farming has seen both the removal of hedgerows and the increased use of insecticides, which means no food or habitat for hedgehogs.
The hedgehog’s last safe haven is our own gardens, but even in suburbia their numbers are going down. In St Albans it is noticeable that you don’t even see as many hedgehog casualties on the roads, which is in itself an indication that there are fewer of them around.
Roads are of course one of the biggest killers of hedgehogs, with hundreds of thousands killed every year in the UK.
But there are many other reasons that hedgehogs are struggling, and how we garden is one of them. Instead of hedgerows between gardens, people now erect impenetrable fences.
Hedgehogs can travel over a kilometre a night, visiting 20-30 gardens to find food (and mates!), but if they can’t get into a garden, they can’t find food, which means having to travel further and cross more roads.
Their preferred food of beetles, caterpillars and worms is also becoming more difficult to find, as the trend is for tidy gardens, no weeds, non-native plants and shrubs, and even fake grass.
The prolific use of chemical insecticides, slug pellets and rat poisons contributes to hedgehog fatalities.
And then there is the contentious issue of injuries to hedgehogs by suburban foxes, whose numbers locally have increased in recent years, mainly due to the public feeding them.
Over half of the admissions to the London Colney Hedgehog Rescue last year were due to fox attacks.
Foxes don’t even eat hedgehogs, but they are hard-wired to hunt small mammals, and although not all foxes will attempt it, many can’t resist snapping at a hedgehog’s spindly back legs as it runs, or attempting to decapitate a hoglet, as they would a chicken or rat. Put simply: the more foxes, the more hedgehog attacks.
Luckily though, there are very simple steps we can all take to help the hogs:
1. Make sure your garden is accessible. Make a gap of a couple of inches under existing fencing, or cut a CD-sized hole in it. If you are replacing a fence with one with concrete running boards, ask the contractor to put in a hedgehog hole.
2. Leave a couple of metres at the end of your garden to go wild: don’t cut the grass, allow native weeds to grow, make a log pile to attract insects. An old pallet piled with your garden cuttings is a great place for a hog to nest and find food.
3. Don’t use insecticides, slug pellets or leave rat poison at ground level or in the open. They are lethal to birds and amphibians as well as hedgehogs.
4. If you have a pond, make sure there is a ramp or shallow edge to enable a hedgehog to get out.
5. Leave out saucers of water, especially in dry weather. NO MILK – hogs are lactose intolerant!
6. DO NOT FEED FOXES. They are apex predators that do not need human intervention.
Even fox charities, such as The Fox Project, do not advocate feeding, as it artificially increases the fox population and leads to territorial shrinkage, increase in disease transmission, and loss of natural behaviour.
7. If you want to feed hedgehogs, offer dry cat biscuits with high animal protein, inside a hedgehog house that can’t be accessed by foxes or cats.
8. Clear rubbish and netting from your gardens. If there’s anything a hedgehog can fall in or get stuck in, it will!
9. Check for hedgehogs before mowing, strimming or lighting bonfires.
In St Albans, grassroots wildlife organisation ‘Wilderhood Watch’ runs various initiatives to help boost biodiversity at the local level. One of their projects, Hogways and Highways, encourages neighbours to get together to make their gardens accessible and hedgehog friendly, while alerting motorists to the presence of hedgehogs in that area with hedgehog traffic signs, available for £5 each.
More information can be found at https://wilderhoodwatch.org/projects/hedgehog-street/
Hedgehogs first evolved 15 million years ago. We can’t lose them now. Please help the hogs!
Jill Stevens is a volunteer at London Colney Hedgehog Rescue and a member of Wilderhood Watch.
