Like many carers, our hedgehog “career” started when we saw a hedgehog out during the day in our back garden.
Elaine immediately knew that he shouldn’t have been out during the day, so we tried to catch him – but he disappeared into our neighbour’s garden. Shortly afterwards, our neighbour found him outside their house. We tried to look after him, but without any success and he died a few days later.
We deliberately didn’t name the first one as we thought it would stop us getting too attached – but it didn’t work!
Our second attempt was not much more successful – Houdini lasted a bit longer, but still died. But our third and fourth ones (Splodge, found on 17 December 2007, and Fudge, found on 3 January 2008) successfully made it through the winter and were released back into our garden in April and May 2008.
The next few hogs all came from our garden, but then we started to get them from other people as well – via local vets, people we knew or people that somehow found out about us.