Hedgehog Footprint Tunnel Survey- Workshop

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 1km2 for 5 consecutive nights and no hedgehog footprints are detected, you can be 95% sure hedgehog are absent from the area. The survey required each member to change the paper and food everyday, as well as checking for any hoggy footprints.

During the first survey we conducted, we found one hedgehog to be resident near the Physics building. We named him Sonic!

During our second survey, we placed the tunnels in different areas around campus to the first survey. We found another resident hedgehog by the Medical School, which came to the tunnel placed in the 'Overbury' contractor's compound. We named her Shelley, after the Overbury logo which is a shell!

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