It has been a few days since I left my trail camera pointed at the hedgehog feeding station overnight so last night I thought I’d catch up with our hedgehog visitors.
In addition to dry kitten biscuits, there are many water dishes spread around the garden and the hedgehogs know where they are.Sadly, we lost one of our rescued juvenile hedgehogs to dehydration during the heatwave. She had come back to us just a month earlier after spending the winter at the Leicestershire Wildlife Hospital. She was discovered on a neighbours lawn, falling over, with very sunken eyes and very thin. There was no obvious signs of trauma and otherwise looked unhurt. Three local vets told me to call back in the morning (this was 5pm) and said I could try to revive it by feeding it rehydrating fluid with a syringe. It was clearly too far gone to survive without proper medical intervention and despite taking some fluids onboard, she died a few hours later.
Luckily, we have lots of hedgehogs visiting gardens where we live and plenty of my neighbours feed and water them all year round. I did, however, take this opportunity to post a note asking everyone to put down water dishes in their gardens in the hope that we don’t lose any more of our spiky friends because of dehydration.
Poppyposts 