Hoglets

Shortly after we moved in Grant and I were doing some work in the garden. I was forking through and removing a pile of debris (including plastic, tins, wadding, weeds, sticks, etc) at the end of the garden. At one point my fork just wouldn't go into a particularly stubborn piece of wadding (or so I thought) and I was poking and pushing really hard ... when I realised it was a large hedgehog! I was mortified! I had disturbed a hedgehog nest, complete with big fat mama hedgehog and four tiny hoglets. By that stage the next was covered in disturbed soil so we carefully removed the little creatures and put them into a box and went to phone a volunteer from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society who advised me to clear her nest and put them all back in there, covering the next with a cardboard box with a door cut out of it, weighted down. She said that hedgehogs typically have four or five nests in a 2km radius and hopefully during the night the mother would remove her babies to another nest, or abandon them. We did as she advised, and checked on them the next morning only to find that she'd left her babies and disappeared. I phoned the volunteer back and she came to fetch the babies, who were only three days old. How cute are they?!