Hedgeblog One: Meet Amy Rose

I was willing to part with, got her settled out back in a cardboard box, and called the Animal Ambulance. They took her to the wildlife vets where, sadly, they found that she had a bacterial infection of some kind and were unable to save her.
     But on with Amy Rose, who shows every sign of being in the absolute prime of health!

     Amy entered our lives by astonishing me when I went to clean our shed. Our shed is ramshackle, rickety, decrepit, and any number of similar words. Throughout the 11 years we've lived here it has become choked with objects, holiday supplies, projects, detritus, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, and assorted crap-all, cleaned out, re-crammed, cleaned again, and so on, rinse and repeat. Now we are at a point where it's vital to do one of the cleanout phases and so a couple of months ago I went out there to do just that. I hauled out a box of party decorations and a standing fan, I knocked a cat carrier

doesn't fit the frame anymore.

     That there are hedgehogs in the area, even at least occasionally in my garden, wasn't a surprise: the neighbor has two hedgehog houses in her garden, several other households around have feeding stations, and my garden, even though it's barely 80 m², is a bastion of wildlife-friendly nooks and crannies, native flowering plants, patches of long grass, stone areas designed to be welcoming to amphibians and spiders, all that kind of thing, so I wasn't astonished that one would come in. Awkward, though, that it had made its way under the shed door with its huge triangular gap, and set up housekeeping exactly where I needed to be working, but nothing to be done about that.

     Research and consultation with experts revealed that this was surely a female, and surely pregnant, unless it was still overwintering – but the weather was so nice, and other hedgehogs in the country had been out for so long, that this was unlikely, so I banked on the former. Hedgehogs are not only endangered and protected, they're delightful and also ecologically beneficial. Under no circumstances was I willing to disturb her, so I tried to figure out ways to get her out of the shed without getting her out of the garden. I did some more inadequate looking-up and built what I thought would be nice shelter across from the shed door, surrounding a crate with bricks and tiles and lining it with long grass from the garden, and took myself away from there. I left it until afternoon the next day and peeked in, discovering two things. First of all, she had been in there. Where I had left it stuffed with grass, there was now a neat ball -shaped hollow. Second of all, it was a freaking oven in there! No wonder she'd gone back to the shed. I resigned myself to not cleaning the shed for several weeks, and put some cat food just inside the door and a dish of water just outside.

     For a few days the food disappeared, then it didn't. Had she moved on? I looked it up, and found that often they don't go anywhere for a few days after giving birth. Was she in there? Was she not? Just about the time I decided she probably wasn't after all, and opened the door with the intention of doing a gingerly investigation prior to cleaning the shed, more food was gone suddenly and there was fresh hedgehog poop just inside. It went on like that for several weeks – I'd wonder if she was still with us, then some food would disappear, or some more scat would appear, and so on. Everything I read was telling me that hedgehogs will usually leave the nesting site and make their way into the world when the babies are six or eight weeks old unless, and here's the kicker, it's a nice, bountiful year (as this one clearly is) – then they often go for a second litter. Now, there's a problem with that. What if this hedgehog did that? Well, that would mean she and the babies would be in my shed until late fall. Guess what hedgehogs start doing in late fall? Looking for a place to overwinter! I cannot imagine that the family wouldn't just decide to stay in the shed until spring – and then pregnancy again. Awkward.

lot of slugs and snails but I've learned that although they will eat them, as conventional wisdom teaches us, not only do they not prefer them, but they can get lung worm and assorted other parasites from them, so I'm very glad that my garden has an assortment of better things for them to munch down on.

     This brings us to three days ago. It was late evening, I was preparing to get ready for bed, the garden was gloomy, nearly completely dark but there was just enough light for me to go out and get my pajamas off the laundry line. As I took them down, I heard a scrambling noise on plastic, and looking down, there she was: Amy Rose the hedgehog, big and sleek, curled up in a defensive ball on top of an empty plastic tray for putting underneath plant pots to catch the water. I spoke to her gently, already backing away, telling her I was glad to see her and she's welcome in the garden; the moment I was out of sight behind other laundry, I heard her quickly dash away to the shed. I ran happily in to tell the family about it, but I also knew what I had to do.

     Obviously I'm not going to disturb my wonderful guest but damn it, I need that shed. Not only are both cat carriers in there (so if we need the vet it could get weird), and the lawnmower, and a great number of my craft supplies, etc., but the big deal is my teenager needs to downsize and de-clutter pending getting new furniture and setting up her new computer to start her voice-acting and live-streaming career, and to accommodate her new disabilities. In other words, I need to put a whole lot more crap into the shed, not just rearrange what's already there and dump a lot of junk. Without disturbing the hedgehog. Probably hedgehogs; not only would it be normal for her to have young at this point, some of the feces scattered around in there are as of a few days ago decidedly smaller than others. This biohazard in itself is going to be a problem, because hedgehogs can carry salmonella, tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis, and quite a few other random things that I don't want to get, let alone carry through to my vulnerable daughter, but once I'm sure there are no more mammals or anything in the shed, later, I can run the UV decontamination lamp in there before cleaning up with bleach, rubber gloves and a good N95 mask on. But back to the point at hand: what to do about my visitor?

to also get underneath the entire structure) that she'll take up housekeeping there and abandon my shed.

     Yesterday, I obviously took the day off from manual labor, or indeed any real labor because folks I have really managed to badly upset the damaged nerve from my neck, thus more or less toasting my upper right quarter (and giving myself wobble-head again), but I did go out and look: some of the grass from inside had been trailed through the entryway, leading me to believe that she at least checked it out. I'm unwilling for a few days to do much poking around: I obviously don't want to freak her out. What I have done is get self-indulgent with some of the Patreon money some of you kind folks are selfless enough to grace me with, to order a low-range but not outright cheapo wildlife camera so I can keep an eye on the situation and, fortune favoring, bring you pictures and videos of Amy Rose and her almost certainly existing family.

     I'll keep you posted about how this goes; with any luck at all, we can persuade her to be a permanent or semi-permanent resident of the new shelter, an immense honor for my garden.