During the late summer months our wild hedgehogs are busy foraging for extra food to start putting on reserves for winter and also many hedgehogs at this time have a second litter of hoglets that need feeding up for winter hibernation. This means they need to forage around quite a lot in many gardens to find enough garden pests to eat. They love slugs, caterpillars and beetles so are a gardeners best friend and therefore should be encouraged into all our gardens. The problem with modern gardens is they are often completely enclosed by walls or fencing down to the ground which block hedgehog paths. Hedgehogs also need to be able to roam around a large area (1-2 miles) to find enough food and in order to meet other hedgehogs to breed. The UK appears to have lost around 30% of the population since 2002 and so it seems likely that there are now fewer than a million hedgehogs left in the UK. If we don’t start looking after our hedgehogs and improving habitats for them as well as food sources (pesticides are also causing a reduction in their numbers), they may become extinct in our lifetime, as early as 2020 some experts say! This makes hedgehogs as much at risk as the tiger on the endangered species list.

Quercus Fencing have designed a hedgehog hole into our natural oak woven fencing panels to enable hedgehogs to roam through gardens more easily, so they can find food, mates and suitable places for winter hibernation (so don’t over tidy your gardens!). Customers can request to have a hedgehog hole put into one or two of their fence panels at no extra cost, and receive an oak tree sapling, so they can help to grow the next generation hedgehogs and oak trees.