A recent conversation with someone revealed that apparently there have only been about 5 sightings of hedgehogs recorded in my area recently. Now I haven't recorded any and neither have several friends but we've all seen them around our streets at night. The gap between what's recorded and what's actually out these is clearly a problem.
In the last 50 years the hedgehog population in the UK fell from 30 million to an estimated 1.5 million. That's a big drop! Now the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and People's Trust for Endangered Species are calling for a new climate survey of these prickly mammals to find out if their hibernation is being affected by climate change.
For more information see here, here and here.
One seen here in Blackpool on the night of Boxing Day - eating a chicken carcass when it should have been sound asleep!
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Davo
Wow! Never heard of that before. Keep an eye out so that you can start filling in the survey from the 1st February here:http://www.hedgehogstreet.org/pages/hibernation-survey.html
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