Hedgehog Friendly Campus UoB

On the 8th June, the University of Birmingham held its 'Green Heart Festival' launch weekend. Measuring  over 12 acres, the Green Heart is a  green space in the centre of campus for students, staff and the local community to enjoy. It provides a unique space for performances, socialising, meeting and studying, while opening up views across the whole campus.  It was a very wet morning putting the gazebo up, but that didn't dampen our spirits! At our stall we had lots of crafts for children to get involved with, including; pine cone hedgehogs, upcycling plastic bottles into hedgehog cress planters, origami hedgehogs and a hedgehog house design competition. The winner of the competition will have their design made by our Estates team and located on the Green Heart.  We had lots of children and families take part in our activities and we were able to advise the local community on how to make their gardens more hedgehog friendly. ...

On 7th June we held a Hedgehog footprint survey tunnel workshop given by Jo at the University of Sheffield and funded by the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. This would help us determine if and where there are hedgehogs on our campus. We had a range of University students, staff as well as members of the local community join us for the session. Jo gave an informative presentation on the Hedgehog Friendly Campus Campaign, about hedgehogs in the UK as well as how to build and conduct our tracking survey. The tunnels have a removable tracking plate that contains two ‘ink’ strips, pot for food (we used dry cat biscuits) and two sheets of paper to record the footprints. We built 10 tunnels to distribute at least 100m away from each other in order to make our finding scientifically significant. If ten baited tunnels are set in up to 1km 2 for 5 consecutive nights and no hedgehog footprints are detected, you can be 95% sure hedgehog are absent from the area. The survey req...