UK Nature Blog

Hedgehog vs cat

The saga of the Hedgehog continues in our garden! It seems that anytime between 9-11pm there's a fair likelihood that if we turn on the garden floodlight we'll see Hedgey either wandering around the lawn or at the food bowl. Late yesterday next door's cat prowled on up to take a look and I watched motionless to see what would happen. Nothing. This cat, which chases down everything from bees to birds and squirrels, simply had a cautious sniff. Didn't even bat it with a paw. I suspect it's been burned before! The Hedgehog didn't give the slightest indication that it even knew the cat was there. I rather expected it to at least run away or curl up into a spiky ball.

I think this hedgehog probably lives under our decking as there's a gap at the side and tonight Hedgey beetled off to that same corner. I've seen the cat poking around there before, in that manner that they do when they're trying to get at another animal, like a mouse behind the sofa. That's probably where it had a previous run in and decided it didn't like Hedgehogs. Which set me thinking - I wonder if the great decking boom of the 90s, fuelled by TV garden makeover shows has handily provided a load of great Hedgehog homes? That said, I suspect people prefer to plug any gaps for fear of vermin, so maybe not.

Hedgehog feeding

It's not very often that I get to tick the "Mammals" category when filing a blog post. They're just that much harder to find compared to birds and insects! But special efforts bring special rewards. I mentioned in my last post a couple of days ago that we were going to put out some food to see if we can lure the hedgehogs that we're fairly sure use our garden, having regularly seen droppings on the lawn. This tactic paid dividends immediately, with the food disappearing the first night (but it could have been next door's cat) then proof positive when we observed the little ball of spines above feeding on the next two nights. It's been bang on 9pm on both occasions, though I think that turning the outside light on scared it off before it finished so we'll leave it be from here on.

The food itself is special Hedgehog food sourced from a local garden centre. Feeding them the 'traditional' bread and milk is actually not a good idea as it gives them diarrhoea. Their usual intake is beetles, worms, slugs and snails, so they are very much carnivorous. I hope it breeds as I still have a surplus of slugs and snails eating my plants!

Surveying Norfolk (and other) wildlife

Norfolk Wildlife Trust have a great website with resources to help in surveying many different kinds of wildlife, from ponds to fungi. The forms are designed to be sent back to report on wildlife in Norfolk, but there's so much great information and guidance that they should be of interest to anybody.

Snow wonder it's cold

Sheep!

Meerkats thrice

Not strictly "UK Nature" but I can't help but notice that Meerkats seem to be quite happy living in outdoor enclosures in UK Zoos, suggesting they could perhaps live here if they really wanted. Apart from the lack of appropriate food and habitat of course, there not being so many lizards, snakes and scorpions for them to nosh on compared to the Kalahari desert. But I do wonder if enough escaped whether they could establish themselves, as plenty of other 'exotic' wildlife has in the past - for instance the Ring-necked parakeets now a fixture in South-East parklands.

The cheeky trio above are huddling for warmth against the North Yorkshire autumn at Thorp Perrow Arboretum, provider of so many recent posts on this blog. I strongly recommend a visit if you're in the area!

Northumberland's finest - Red squirrel

No trip to Northumberland would be complete without Red squirrels, so here's one for you, gnawing on a pine cone of some sort. Actually this squirrel is caged at Thorp Perrow Arboretum (which is in North Yorkshire, as has been pointed out to me) and photographed through the mesh as described in my previous post. I did see a few in the wild but they were too quick for me this year. I did notice that they seemed more deeply coloured, with notably blacker tails than the ones I had seen last year, which may be meaningful in some way but is probably just natural variation or dodgy memory.

A tail of an autumnal squirrel

It's particularly interesting to look closely at the tail of this grey squirrel, where you can see two distinct layers of fur: a very wispy outer layer that's hardly there at all, and a denser, shorter inner layer. At the heart of it all you can just make out the very thin, flesh and blood part that's much the same as a rat's tail.

Rise of the black squirrels

A new worry has emerged for those that would like to freeze nature in time: the rise of the black squirrel, as reported by the BBC. Apparently the result of a rare genetic mutation that only affects colour, these are basically exactly the same as grey squirrels, apart from the obvious difference.

It's thought that they must have been brought across from America at some point in the fairly distant past. Anecdotally the UK population seems to be gradually increasing in numbers and spreading, with a decent foothold across Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. Seeing as they are fundamentally the same critter, the blacks are not competing with the greys - it's all just one big inter-breeding population as far as they're concerned, aesthetic preferences aside - but the black gene is dominant so tends to show itself as it gets passed on.

Black rabbit in the wild

A fairly lousy photo I'm afraid, but it shows quite clearly a pure black rabbit in a garden, along with a more ordinarily coloured version in the foreground. These are both 'wild' rabbits, so I can only presume that the black one is an escaped pet. Apparently it's been around for a while and seems quite happy.

Could it inter-breed with the others, and if so what colour would its progeny be? A quick web search suggests that yes they can inter-breed, depending on the exact species of domestic rabbit. I imagine pet rabbits escape quite often so it's perhaps surprising that we don't see more variation in the colours of rabbits in the wild. But maybe the swift turnover of rabbit populations soon engulfs these oddities and loses their DNA in the wider pool.