It was my wife who first spotted the signs. So I had little choice but to tell her what is going on. She understood.
She came into the kitchen asking about the droppings she had spotted on the lawn. Did they belong to a hedgehog? Indeed they did, and the interesting fact was that there were two of them. Then other things began to make sense. After taking relatively little of the food I put out for the hedgehog, in the past week or so the plate and the water dish have both been thoroughly cleaned out on a regular basis. The signs are pointing to the possibility that our garden is now being visited by two hedgehogs and not only one, as before.
Naturally my mind has been racing with imaginative scenarios of various kinds. Of course, we don’t actually know the sex of the original visitor. Assuming that the first hedgehog is male, I see the trips to my place as an impressive meal in a classy restaurant. If, on the other hand, the first visitor is female, the line from a Leadbelly classic comes to mind. “Come home to my kitchen, baby, it’s raining outdoors.”
Either way, I hope I’m right …. and I hope they will be happy.