Experts say hedgehogs face crisis
in towns and countryside, as RSPB records fewer sightings of the animals for
third year in a row
Friday 7 July 2017 18.10 BST
First published on Friday 7 July 2017 16.36 BST
During the day they curl up in
nests of shredded paper but when night falls those that are well enough scurry
and snuffle around the old fish boxes that serve as their temporary homes.
These hedgehogs at the RSPCA’s West
Hatch animal centre in Somerset have had a tough time of it. Some
have tangled with dogs, strimmers, bonfires, fruit netting or vehicles; others
have been brought in as tiny unseeing hoglets, having lost their parents.
The hedgehogs, which arrive here
from as far afield as south Wales and Cornwall, will be nursed back to health
by vets and animal carers, and released either close to where they were found
or into a hog-friendly piece of West Country countryside.
They are – relatively speaking –
the lucky ones. Figures out this week show a deeply worrying wider trend.
In the
RSPB’s annual garden watch survey, hedgehogs were spotted in fewer gardens for
the third consecutive year. One quarter of the 139,000 gardens surveyed
did not record a single sighting in the whole of 2016.
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