Hedgehog Awareness Week 2021

This week (2nd-8th May) is Hedgehog Awareness Week! Hedgehog Awareness Week is a time to focus on helping hedgehogs.

My brothers and I have been using this week to help hedgehogs in our garden and tell other people all about helping hedgehogs too.

At the start of the week, we made two new hedgehog houses. We used instructions from the RSPB.

Then we made some hedgehog letters for everybody around our block. The letters told them about the hedgehogs that visit our garden, facts about them and how to help them and keep your garden safe for hedgehogs. I also made a template of a hedgehog highway and my brother Jake made pictures of a sad hedgehog trying to get into a garden and a happy hedgehog with a hedgehog highway to go through.

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We delivered the letters and templates to 166 houses!

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You can help hedgehogs too if you like!

Hedgehogs need to travel around 2km every night so a really good way to help them is to put a hedgehog highway (a 13cm hole that hedgehogs can go through) in your fence so that they can get in and out of your garden and into other gardens.

Other good ways to help hedgehogs are putting out water and hedgehog food or meaty cat or dog food. You can make hedgehogs a hedgehog house. You can leave a corner of your garden wild and make things like compost heaps, log piles and wildflower beds to help hedgehogs find food.

It’s important to tidy up netting at night so hedgehogs can’t get tangled up in it and pick up litter so hedgehogs can’t get stuck in it. It’s also important to check when you’re using strimmers, hedge cutters and lawn mowers in case there are hedgehogs and to check when you have a bonfire in case there are hedgehogs sleeping in it. You can make drains safe for hedgehogs by covering them up so they don’t fall in and you can make ponds safe by making sure they have sloping edges or a ramp so that hedgehogs can get out if they fall in.

If you want to learn more about hedgehogs you can play Hedgehog Highways: The Board Game!