Hedgehog Habitat.

Another species under threat in our gardens is one you don't see very often but can be a helping hand to most gardeners the hedgehog. Again as with bees its down to our changing garden meaning more concrete and less garden for wildlife to make a home in, with hedgehogs most of the problems come down to two facts. The first being as mad as it sounds our gardens are far to neat and tidy meaning they don't have anywhere to make a home or sleep away the winter months. If you look back 50yrs or so nearly every garden had a patch left to run wild usually with a nice composed heap or something like that where not just the hedgehogs could benefit but a lot of our other native creatures, now this is pretty much all disappeared leaving the hedgehog without the kind of habitat it needs. The second factor is because of our use of slug poisons, what happens here is the slugs ingest the poisons in small amounts which will kill them but when the hedgehog comes along and eats the slugs the poisons start building and building in his system until eventually it'll kill them as well. Today people tend to understand this and don't use so many chemicals in there gardens as it's more widely known the damage it can course to the local ecosystem so there's hope with this factor that we making progress. On the other hand how do you encourage people to have a more messed up corner to there garden, a lot of people just aren't going to be interested so its down to the few in this case to try and help out. There is an outside issue which effects hedgehog numbers and that's death on our roads, the obvious solution is for people to be a little more aware at night of wildlife on the roads but again for the few that'll change the way they drive at night most will just carry on thinking its not there problem. So the outlook for the hedgehog is getting better but on the whole his future isn't looking as good as it could do.