We have hedgehogs in Netherlands, and they are curious creatures.
One can eat half it's bodyweight in wet cat food if the food is provided, night after night. And amusingly, they will actually nudge a cat out of the way to get the food.
They are incredibly noisy eaters, slurping and smacking so loud you can hear it through the walls if it's quiet otherwise.
And this I would not have believed if my wife's colleague hadn't posted a video, but a hedgehog can and will drag a chicken of double it's size out of the henhouse, kill it, and feast on it.
Hedgehogs are a pest in New Zealand due to them killing insects and birds. I had no idea they would tackle birds that big though.
New Zealand has a lot of birds that hang around near the ground and make nests low down.
Somehow I have ended up with a pet hedgehog at home, which started after I found a very dehydrated, very young one wandering around during the day.
The noises it makes when it finds food are quite funny, squeaks and squawks.
I googled to find out if these where native hedgehogs, but of course not, someone liked hedgehogs enough to bring them on a months long sea voyage to New Zeeland. Amazing.
I had no idea that hedgehogs might predate something the size of a chicken. I'm not convinced because their jaws are quite small and not particularly strong. They would really have to fierce up.
This appears to be a charming micro-scale system of wildlife overpasses[1]. The macro-scale versions (overpasses above large freeways) are often less popular, at least in North America, due to cost and political concerns about encouraging dangerous or destructive species: wolves piss ranchers off and apex predators scare people--despite the the fact that the material risk/damage caused by such predators is statistically and financially miniscule.
In light of that, it's great to see conservation efforts starting small (cheap) and benign (hedgehogs) as a way to get people involved and caring about local wildlife! While the impact of the system designed in the article seems to be less-than-rigorously understood, the effort and empathy investment by the community in the "highway" is, I think, a very real and good thing for environmental work.
Sadly, the fact that they are small and dark-coloured, tend to travel at night and have the instinct to curl up in a ball when in danger (which protects them from all of their predators, but not from cars) all work against them...
The last hedgehogs to live in a central London park have survived because they have learnt to avoid busy roads, a study suggests.
[…]
Clare Bowen, of the Royal Parks Foundation, said: “We’ve tagged a number of animals and we’ve got a very good idea of where they are going. We don’t have any indication of them leaving the park at all or crossing any of the main roads.
“We don’t have any records of squashed hedgehogs around Regents Park. All this would suggest they steer clear of busy roads.”
One can eat half it's bodyweight in wet cat food if the food is provided, night after night. And amusingly, they will actually nudge a cat out of the way to get the food.
They are incredibly noisy eaters, slurping and smacking so loud you can hear it through the walls if it's quiet otherwise.
And this I would not have believed if my wife's colleague hadn't posted a video, but a hedgehog can and will drag a chicken of double it's size out of the henhouse, kill it, and feast on it.