This morning I remembered that after the death of our visiting hedgehog I had not got around to retrieving its feeding dish. To my surprise, when I pulled out the dish from the refuge it had been licked clean. I know that when I looked last there had still been a good deal of food in it. The remaining food had been taken after the death of our visitor … but by what?
Regular readers of this blog might remember that some time ago I speculated that we might have more than one visitor. The evidence was, I admit, slender, largely consisting of my observations that there were more plentiful droppings than usual. Now I am beginning to wonder whether my imagination might have had a firmer basis than I thought.
I guess I will have to borrow the trail-cam from our friends, which was indispensable in establishing at the beginning of this saga that we did, indeed, have a hedgehog in the garden. Tonight I have put our more food, and we will see what happens. There was a reasonable fall of snow today, and the temperature has fallen noticeably. It is a toss-up as to whether we will find ourselves still feeding a small creature, or whether it will decide that now is the time to hibernate.