“There’s one antidote to gloom and despair that never fails: the wildlife that got us all going in the first place. It’s brilliant, beautiful, bewildering, intriguing and inspiring. We’ll probably do a lot more good if we spend more time outside engaging with it, rather than inside reading about or watching things (on TV) that make us angry (like Brexit, for example)….”
Regular reader(s?!) of this blog website may know about our single male hedgehog.
Trapped in three, perhaps four* of our local back gardens because like most Brits, our neighbours like their gardens neat and tidy and airtight (and DEVOID of wildlife), and all alone as the hedgehogs that had got into and used and bred in our gardens over the last 8 years had all moved on or been eaten by foxes.
*I say trapped in three or four of our back gardens but unless I'd dug tunnels under our fences it would have been trapped in just one (our western neighbours).
Well... a single male hedgehog is no use to the species - and it became obvious to me over the Spring this year, on waking from its annual hibernation, our single male hedgehog wanted to escape to pastures new. Find a mate. Raise rugrats etc.
So I dug a tunnel through concrete under our side passage door, with an SDS hammer drill.
At first, indeed for the last few weeks, our hedgehog used the tunnel most nights - but only explored our front garden for a minute or ten -always returning to our back garden and then under our fence to its home under the western neighbours' shed.
Over the last week, it stopped using our "concrete tunnel" at all.
And then suddenly... two nights ago, he (again) pegged it down our side passage, hesitated at the exit (so to speak), then squeezed through the concrete tunnel - and he never came back.
"How do you know he never came back?!" I hear you indignantly splutter through a mouthful of soggy cornflakes. "We've been here before, haven't we?"
Well, yes - I thought our male hedgehog had perhaps disappeared for good a few weeks ago, but my brace of trail cameras picked up the little shuffler the very next night - but that HASN'T happened now for two nights.
Not one of my trail cameras has picked up any movement from 'our' single male hedgehog for two nights now - and I've put the cameras in ALL his favourite old spots.
So.
He's gone.
And whilst we are a little sad, the whole REASON I dug that final tunnel through the concrete is to give him that chance to go.
To get out, find a mate and fulfil his desttttttinnnyyyyyyy. (To be said with a James Earl Jones voice, or similar).
I hope he returns.
With a female in tow?
But to be honest, right now, I'm chuffed he's gone and my main concern is that he doesn't get run over on our road (he's almost certainly not seen one before) before he has a chance to make himself immortal by passing on his genes to the next generation.
Good luck old chap.