According to the international red list, prepared by the nature conservation organization IUCN, the population of hedgehogs in several European countries has decreased by more than 30 percent in the past ten years.
It is a worrying development, believes Sophie Lund Rasmussen, Denmark’s only full-time research hedgehog expert at both Oxford University and Aalborg University. She is among the researchers who are behind the report and the designation of hedgehogs as a more endangered animal species.
– The hedgehog’s survival is one hundred percent conditional on us making our villa gardens hedgehog-friendly, because that is where the hedgehog lives nowadays, she says.
According to Sophie Lund Rasmussen, there is still hope if we act now.
– One of the most important ways to reverse this development is to get people to consider hedgehogs in their garden design and create a friendlier environment for them, she says.
She shares a number of tips on how we can protect the hedgehogs:
According to Sophie Lund Rasmussen, around one in three hedgehogs in Europe is run over on the roads each year. Sara Gangsted/Ritzau Scanpix
– One of the biggest problems is dogs that can think of attacking hedgehogs. Therefore, it is incredibly important that if your dog shows aggressive behavior towards hedgehogs, it must be kept on a lead in the evening when the hedgehogs come out, and the dog must be let out. That way you can ensure that it does not attack the hedgehogs, says Sophie Lund Rasmussen.
– So it is important that the hedgehogs have a good place to live. It can be a manure pile or a compost pile, and they also like to live under sheds and wooden decks, they are actually very adaptable. But it is of course important that you have a place for them, because some villa gardens are short grass and tiles, and the hedgehogs cannot thrive in that, because then there are no places where they can live, says Sophie Lund Rasmussen.
– You have to make sure that you have a garden full of ticks, bugs and snails, because that’s what the hedgehogs eat. So the wilder the garden you have, and the more biodiversity you attract, the better it is for the hedgehogs.
– It is a bad idea to put milk out for the hedgehogs. If you want to help them, you can put water in front of them and make sure that there are plenty of natural food items for them. If there is not, then cat food can be put forward as the best supplement, it is very high in protein, so it is quite similar to the dietary composition of their natural food. If you put something out, you must pay attention to maintaining good hygiene, because they are not called pigs for no reason, and they shit where they eat. If they eat from the same bowl, they can infect each other, says Sophie Lund Rasmussen.
– You must make sure to avoid using poison in your garden, because my research shows that the poison ends up in the hedgehogs, even if it was not intended for the hedgehogs. This is simply because the hedgehogs can eat ants that have received ant poison and snails that have received snail poison. Hedgehogs can also eat dead animals such as mice and rats, and they can also go into the poison box themselves if they can get to it, but we believe that this mainly happens via secondary poisoning, says Sophie Lund Rasmussen.
– Then there are garden tools. The hedgehogs lie down and sleep during the day when we tidy up the garden, and they can, for example, find themselves lying under a hedge and sleeping. So if you go with an edge trimmer, you may end up cutting the hedgehogs, unfortunately this happens quite often. Then there are also some robotic lawnmowers that can manage to drive the hedgehogs to pieces, and therefore it is really important that they only run during the day, says Sophie Lund Rasmussen.
– If you have a trampoline that is dug in, and the edges down to the hole are steep, then the hedgehogs can fall down and risk being trapped down there. Then they lie down there and die of hunger and thirst. That’s why it’s really important, if you have such a buried trampoline, that you make sure that only on one side is there a slope or some other kind of stairs or plank, which means that they can get back up, says Sophie Lund Rasmussen.
2024-10-29 18:13:00
#hedgehog #endangered
