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Garden & Wildlife · 5 Reasons

5 Reasons Why British Gardeners Are Putting Out This Little Hedgehog House Before the First Frost — and why rescue centres warn that the cheap ones on the garden-centre shelf can be worse than nothing at all.

A sweet chestnut hedgehog house at the edge of a border, a few steps from the back door.

Every autumn, thousands of young hedgehogs leave their mothers and go looking for one thing: a dry place to sleep through the winter. Most of them cross garden after garden and find nothing.

The hedgehog has been on Britain’s Red List since 2020. In the countryside, numbers have fallen by between a third and three-quarters since the year 2000. And much of the trouble is not out on the farms. It is in the back garden, in the last weeks of October.

That is why a small house made of untreated sweet chestnut has turned up in so many British gardens this autumn. Here are five reasons why.

1Almost Every Place a Hedgehog Sleeps Is Gone by November

The kind of shelter most gardens offer. A heap of leaves rarely survives the autumn tidy-up.

Researchers looked at 2,546 real hedgehog nests in British gardens. Nearly half were simply under plants at the back of a border. The rest were under sheds, in log piles, in compost heaps and under decking.

Now think about what happens to each of those places in autumn.

Not one of those places was put there for him. Almost none of them is safe past the end of October. A house with a floor and a roof is the one thing in the garden that will still be there in March.

“After reading this I realised there was not one place in our garden where a hedgehog could have spent the winter.”Hilary M., Herefordshire

2The Cheap Ones Can Be Worse Than Nothing

Left: what most gardens offer. Right: a house with a solid floor and a proper roof.

Every September, garden centres fill a shelf with wicker igloos and little painted cottages. They are cheap and they look lovely. But the people who rescue hedgehogs spend a lot of time warning against them. One rescue’s advice is simple: always avoid igloo-type houses.

Most of the damage comes from four faults:

This house has none of those four faults. There is no wire, no felt and no plywood anywhere on it. It has a solid floor, a curved roof that sheds the rain, and a doorway that turns a corner.

“I volunteer at a hedgehog rescue. Legs caught in mesh, chilled animals out of collapsed wicker domes. This is the only one I recommend.”Dr Frances L., Warwickshire

3It Keeps Him Asleep, Not Just Warm

Overlapping chestnut battens with the bark left on. The curve throws the rain off.

Here is the part most people never hear. A hedgehog does not sleep through the winter in one go. He wakes up a dozen times or more between November and March. Every time he wakes, he burns three or four days’ worth of the fat he spent all autumn putting on.

He needs about 450 grams on him to make it to spring. One in three of this year’s young never gets there. So a hedgehog does not usually freeze. He runs out of fat because he keeps waking up.

What wakes him is change: a draught, or a thin box that heats up in the sun and goes cold at night. This house is built to stay still instead.

In side-by-side checks with a simple thermometer, the inside of this house changed by about three degrees over a winter night. A thin shop-bought box nearby changed by fourteen. Both boxes had the same weather that night.

4A Cat Can Sit on It. A Cat Cannot Get In.

Where the neighbour’s cat usually ends up: on the roof, not inside.

Cats are the worry everybody has. Most hedgehog houses have a straight hole in the front with nothing behind it, so any cat or fox can reach a paw straight in.

This one has a board set just behind the doorway. To get inside, you have to walk round a corner. A hedgehog does that easily. A paw cannot bend round it, and neither can the wind.

The doorway itself is 9.8 centimetres wide. That is big enough for a fully grown hedgehog, but too tight for a cat’s shoulders. Owners who worried about cats tend to report the same thing: the cat sits on the roof in the sun, and that is as far as it gets.

“We have four cats on this street, and my last two boxes ended up as very expensive cat beds. Two months in, and not one cat has managed this one.”Nicola B., Kettering

5It Actually Gets Used, and This Autumn’s Batch Is Small

11.40pm, a garden in Worcestershire. The first visitor of the season.

The house is small enough to sit along a bed edge or beside the shed, close to the house, where you can see it from the kitchen window. That matters. A house you can see is a house you keep a saucer of food beside, and food near the door is one of the best signs that someone will move in.

Late September into October is the best time of year to put one out. That is exactly when this summer’s young are leaving their mothers and looking for somewhere to spend the winter.

Each house is made from untreated sweet chestnut, with no wire, no felt and no plywood. The houses come in small batches. The last batch sold out in eleven days, and the current one is down to its last few dozen.

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