There is nothing more amazing then having a hedgehog in your garden. Building a home will really encourage them to stay. Hedgehog numbers, sadly, are falling, due to loss of habitat, so by building a home you will help the conservation workers hoping to improve our hedgehog numbers.

I made my hedgehog house because I found The British Hedgehog Preservation Society website. This tells you loads of stuff about hedgehogs and has activities for kids too. If you go on their website and go to leaflets the 3rd one down is hedgehog homes.

So without further ado here is how I built my hedgehog house;

There are two important things to building a hedgehog house:

1.  the the entrance must by at least 30 cm long and 13cm by 13 cm in height and width, this is so that predators like cats, foxes and badgers can’t get in.

2.  The hedgehog must have space to move round lie down and stand up. The hedgehog preservation society recommends the house being around 40 cm long and 26cm wide, but their drawings are quite complicated.

We built our hedgehog home out of some spare wood, and we also attached roofing felt to the plank of wood that made the roof. We screwed the pieces of wood together, and found a leafy well hidden place in our garden. We also got some straw from the local horse riding stables to make a comfy bed but you don’t have to do this as a hedgehog will make its own bed. Don’t worry about having to clean it out because hedgehogs know that they shouldn’t poo in their bed.

Personally I had so much fun making my hedgehog house and it was great to see the finished result. I also love to go out at night around dusk time and watch my hedgehog come out of his house. Mine comes out about 8:30 pm in the late summer and once you have discovered when they go out you can do it all the time, as hedgehogs tend to have a routine that they stick to. They are quite tame and don’t mind humans being around, they also don’t mind torches being shone on them as long as you don’t keep doing it and keep the bursts of light short.