Alfie gets homesick

We had some rain yesterday evening. Not a lot - less than 1mm - but enough to make the ground wet, and perhaps enough to change the hedgehogs' behaviour.

Alfie was up first in 9b - and went back up to see Flatmate in 9a for a couple of hours, then they came out together and went their separate ways:



Here's Alfie leaving for his night on the tiles:



But they met up back in 9a this morning - Alfie spent the day in 9a.

I've said in the past that Nightshift doesn't like the rain, and this seemed to confirm it. She was up quite late, and she was sniffing the air a lot before she came out. When she did come out, she was only out for a few minutes, and confined herself to the food bowls. We have a plastic canopy hanging over the front of 9c/9d to keep the food dry, and she seems to restrict herself to this area. The interesting thing is that she ate some of the peanuts we put out on the extra middle bowl.



She came out a couple of time for a few minutes, and when she went back into the nest she really snuggled herself down in the straw.



Later on, she was pawing the newspaper lining the sides of the tunnel before she came out. Only after the rain had stopped did she leave the nest - and she didn't come back! She stayed away all day.

Not only did Nightshift have an awayday, but 9d did as well. So for the first time in weeks we had no hedgehogs on the patio during the day. The other visiting hedgehogs weren't as frequent visitors during the night, and there were only two visits at the front, one of which was Alfie. Perhaps the tiny amount of rain was enough to bring out their natural food and they were making the most of it.

The peanuts seemed to be liked, so we put some on more of the feeders. Some had been taken, so we will see how things go. We are getting very low on mealies, so I ordered another 10kg tonight... gulp £££.

As I desperately need to get rid of some of the video captures to free up some disk space, I started looking through the videos, using VLC player and just jumping through the video, looking for changes. This is where the straw comes in useful, as the hedgies can't move through the straw without disturbing it. If a four hour video clip has the straw in the same place at the beginning and the end, the whole clip can be dumped without watching. What this process showed is that Flatmate is in the habit of popping out of 9a for a few minutes during the day. He just nips round the side of the tunnel, so it looks like he is spending a penny.

We built another hedgehog house today - yes, another. This is to go in 9f, and is a semi. The boiler room is quite small, but due to its brick construction, we thought it would be reasonably secure and comparatively warm, so we are using the door to provide one wall of the access tunnel, so most of the space in the box can be living accommodation. It's still smaller that 9b/9c/9d, but of similar size to 9a, which is housing two hedgehogs, so we hope it will be comfortable. It will be interesting to see what the visitors make of the change. The hedgehogs seem quite inquisitive and prepared to investigate, so hopefully the new box structure won't put them off compared to the open-plan straw mattress they were using until last night.