Hungry Hedgehogs - A Free Print and Play Game

Happy Hedgehog Awareness Week!
To help educate people about hedgehogs in a fun way I've invented a free print and play board game about hedgehogs.



In Hungry Hedgehogs it’s autumn and the hedgehogs are in a hurry to fatten up enough to survive their winter hibernation.

Help your hedgehog forage for food and avoid the perils and see if you can be the first hedgehog ready for hibernation!

Hungry Hedgehogs features an innovative sliding board so your hedgehog grows fatter the more you feed it. It is easy to pick up and play as all the actions are explained on the game cards so once you’ve read the single page of rules you can get straight to playing!

Hungry Hedgehogs teaches about the real life ecology of wild hedgehogs, the perils they face and how to help them. It also teaches simple maths skills as modifiers add and subtract the amount of food your hedgehog gets each turn.

Suitable for ages 5+

Playtime 20-30 minutes

For 2-5 players. (If you’d like to try 6 players, I think the game will still work fine, you’ll just have to shuffle the discard pile more often and find more food tokens)

Download the Hungry Hedgehogs PDF * right now! It contains everything you need to play!

*updated to version 2.1 20-06-16

Secret Project, Coming Soon!

I've been working on a new fun hedgehog themed project that I'll be revealing to you soon!
It'll be free as well, and lots of fun.
I'm itching to tell you, but I'm saving it for Hedgehog Awareness Week.

Pog is itching to reveal all as well, but I've told her she has to keep it secret.


Don't worry you only have a couple of days to wait because it starts on 1st May!
So come back then to see the secret revealed!

Identifying Hedgehog Poop

Last week my camera trap had to be sent away to be fixed after developing a fault, so it was back to tracking Pog the old fashioned way!
Luckily she left me lots of signs, disturbed trails in the grass, knocked over sticks I had placed by the doorway to her house, and of course a bowl of food licked clean. And finally poop!

It was due to finding mystery poop in my garden that I first realised I had a hedgehog visitor so it's a good thing to look out for if you're trying to attract hedgehogs and don't have a camera trap.

Luckily it's pretty easy to identify too.

It's smaller than cat poop and generally quite black. Also it can look sparkly (like the poop on the left in the photo below) due to all the insect casings it contains. It can also look shiny and slimy if the hedgehog has been eating a lot of worms. (right hand poop)




If you're unsure the best way to confirm if you have hedgehog poop is to swirl it in some water.
You might need to poke it with a stick to break it up. (Don't worry it doesn't smell bad) This separates out the insect casings, if you find them, then you definitely have hedgehog poop.
Look for shiny bits like in this close up photo. They're pretty small so you might need a magnifying glass to see them.




Like an owl pellet, you can find out what your hedgehog has been eating by dissecting the poop.

My dissection revealed that Pog has been eating earwigs, I found earwig pincers:




Beetles, I found wing casings:




And worms, I found worm skins:





Happy poop hunting! :D

New Door Designs

Fresh from the hands of Made In Rugby, I have 2 new Hedgehog Door designs for you.

First the Hedgehog and Fairy Door!
Let hedgehogs and fairies visit your garden with this combined door!



Next up is the Create Your Own Door.
It might not look very special here, but that means you can get arty and create your very own design on this blank canvas!



The new doors are available to buy now in the Shop.

How to be a Hedgehog

I recently made a hedgehog costume and dressed up for an Easter event.

Half the fun was making the costume.
It was a bit of a rush, but I'm pleased with how it turned out!

Here's how I made it.

First I found a papercraft sculpture of a hedgehog (which wasn't easy!)
I enlarged the head part of the papercraft until it was big enough to make a mask.




Then I cut it out of double thick cardboard and glued it together with a gluegun.



I also made a head band so I could wear the mask comfortably and attached that to the mask.




Next I covered the whole mask with strips of gumstrip to smooth the joins in the cardboard and make the mask stronger..
You can find this in art supply stores, or picture framers.
It's better than paper mache because you don't have to wait for it to dry and it doesn't make your cardboard base soggy.






Next it was painting time!
I also gave it a coat of varnish in case it rained at the event.






Now I sewed a hood and attached it to the headband to disguise it and allow me to attach peg spines.
I also made a bib to cover my neck.






The mask is now done, so next job was hunting the charity shops for a brown hoodie or sweater.
I found one tho it was a bit tight for the job, you want a baggy one ideally so it doesn't get to tight when you attached the peg spines.

I sewed some tummy fur to the front of the hoodie using an old towel that was the right colour.





For the spines I used clothes pegs. They were half dipped in brown paint to have a more spiney effect and then pegged all over my back and hood on the day. below was just a test run, on the day  had approx. 150 peg spines.





The final touches were some brown gloves that I picked up cheap on the market, and brown boots.
Then I was ready to be a hedgehog! :D

A Hedgehogs Shedule

I learnt an interesting thing about hedgehogs recently, that hedgehogs can eat between 57g and 71g of food per night, but their stomachs can only hold about 32g. This means that they get up and have their breakfast, then have to go for a rest to digest it before they can go fill up again later in the night!

Here's some footage of Pog through one night, she returned to her house after and initial forage and then went off again later for more! :)

How to Use a Hedgehog Door by Pog

Pog expertly shows how a Hedgehog Door works when she visited the Pub for a snack and drink last night. (the details of the door don't show on the infra-red camera sadly)




Ironically I don't have a fence suited to putting a Hedgehog Door in (Pog uses the gate) But you can use a Hedgehog Door to add a bit of fun to the entrance of your hedgehog feeding station like I have here or on hedgehog house too. :)

Pogs Wild Friends

Yesterday Pog had caused a right ruckus in the restaurant, she'd rearranged all the bowls. Too bad the camera trap was elsewhere.

When I was down by Pog's house in the morning, I heard her snoring! X3

Later Martha wood mouse came for her breakfast in the mouse viewer.

And then I made a new friend, the beefly!

Beefly looked a bit poorly, so I wondered if some sugar water would perk it up like it does bees.
It certainly lapped it up! I think it helped a bit.

Good luck beefly!

Hedgehog in the Park

This Easter I helped out with the Easter event at Caldecott Park in Rugby as usual.
We decided to try and make the event a bit more special by dressing up as British wildlife and teaching the kids some cool animal facts as they did the hunt.

Of course I had to be a hedgehog!




Here we are at the start with Fox, Badger and Owl.
I hadn't finished putting all my spines on yet!




And here's Hedgehog doing some educating.
The kids knew plenty already which was great, but I had some super fun facts up my sleeve to get them excited about hedgehogs.
I also corrected a couple of people who still knew of people feeding milk to hedgehogs. ^^"

Despite a cold and slightly rainy day we all had a great time, and loads of people came!
I can't wait till I can next dress up as a hedgehog!

Dinner With Pog

Now I know Pog is back I cracked open a tin of wet chicken dog food for her to enjoy.

I got some fun video of her enjoying it and made a little video of her dining.
Take a look. It's worth watching to see her raise her prickles, and have you ever seen a hedgehog sneeze? Now you can!

How to Hibernate Like a Pro!

My neighbourhood hedgehog, Pog, went into hibernation during a cold snap on 12th November 2015.
Yesterday on the cold, wet blustery night of 7th of April 2016 she woke up!
Being a mild winter most people reported their hedgehogs hibernating late and getting up to feed during their hibernation.
Not Pog, I saw hide nor spine of her till now. I was worried, but it turns out she was just hibernating like a pro! :D

I have had my camera trap trained on the entrance to Pog's house for over a month hoping to capture the moment she shambled into the spring.
Either Pog moved house during the winter, my camera failed, or Pog can teleport because it failed to capture anything! Even my low tech hedgehog detectors (small sticks stuck in the ground in front of her house) hadn't been moved. (ps. I have reason to believe from other encounters that Pog can in fact teleport! She's one sneaky ninja hedgehog! XD)

I had been waiting months to see the food left out for her in the hedgehog restaurant disappear, so yesterday when I saw it had, I was super excited, and then super disappointed to find only a cat on the camera trap.

But it's not just disappearing food and camera traps that can prove a hedgehog has been, there's also poop! A quick look around the garden revealed 3 hedgehog poops, so I was assured of a spikey visitor.

Last night I put the camera in the hedgehog restaurant, and was rewarded with proof of my theory!
Check it out!




I'm super chuffed to see my spikey friend again! X3


There is a chance this isn't Pog, but I'm reasonably certain it is. Here's my evidence.
Pog is always a late visitor, she's a very shy hedgehog so 2:35am is exactly the time I'd expect her to turn up.
There were poops in the entrance and right outside her house. So I think she found room to dodge around the sticks as she exited.
She knew how to find and get into the hedgehog restaurant without needed a mealworm trail to help. My hedgehog restaurant has a switch back entrance to stop cats and it seems like she knew how to get in and was not at all nervous which a new hedgehog might have been.
My camera trap, while brilliant has been known to fail before so it may have failed in detecting her. The fact that it's last capture was 31st March and there was only one capture makes me think it failed. There are mice and cats always around there so it should have captured something else in the 6 days in between.

I'm not sure if Pog stayed in the garden overnight, I've put more low tech hedgehog detectors around Pog's house and the new hedgehog hut, so I hope she's stayed in one of them.

I'm looking forward to what new hedgehoggy things I can learn from Pog this year and going to work on making the garden an even better hedgehog home!

Welcome to Spring Pog!

Martha the Wood Mouse

I love hedgehogs, but I also love other wildlife too!
I'm particularly fond of wood mice and was thrilled when they started visiting the hedgehog restaurant.

I decided to make them their own restaurant right by my window so I could watch them coming to feed from my desk. I call it the Mouse Viewer!

It's worked out better than I ever hoped!

I made a wooden box from scrap plywood and other scrap materials with an opening roof to put food in and one wall made of Perspex to let me see in.




I positioned the box on my windowsill and made a network of tubes, scavenged from a skip, to lead the mice safely to the mouse viewer.



Then I put food in the tubes to encourage the mice to use them.
After 3 days they made it to the mouse viewer and I saw my first visitor.

It was Martha the wood mouse, and she's become a regular at all times of day!

Best of all she doesn't seem to be afraid of me watching her from inside the house. I think the reflections on the glass and Perspex make it hard for her too see me, which means I can get right up close, just inches from her.

The downside of that is that sometimes it's hard for me to see into the box, and it's very difficult to take good photos of her. I'll keep working on that though!

Meanwhile, here's some photos and even a video of Martha in the mouse viewer!






Video:

Hedgehog Huts

In the hope that I get more hedgehog visitors this year, I have been working on some more shelters in case my visitors want to stay over.

Pog's house was built from an old leaky water butt. I only used the bottom half though, so there was plenty left.
I cut the top section in half to make 2 hedgehog huts.




Then I positioned the first hut and banked up some earth round it to keep the drafts out.




Next I got some logs, already nicely rustic looking and put them on top and used them to form a small entrance.
The logs will hopefully help moderate the temperature inside, though it is positioned in a shady spot.

I might add a tunnel to the entrance if the neighbourhood cats show too much interest in it.




Finally I put some hay in to make a nice cosy hog bed. Stunt Pog went in to check it out. I think she approves!



I have enough logs to cover the other hut once I decide where to put it.