The Lower Sunbury Hedgehog Project is a campaign initiated by the Lower Sunbury Residents Association in partnership with Friends of Sunbury Park and Spelthorne Borough Council. Our aim is to arrest the decline in our local hedgehog population and if possible improve their numbers.
Hedgehogs are in danger across the UK – the population has declined drastically through loss and fragmentation of habitat, and our situation is no different. We see very few hedgehogs these days compared to 20 years ago.
We can all help. Hedgehogs thrive in domestic gardens, where they find the ideal variety of food. However, they travel a kilometre or two at a time during the night as they forage, meaning they need to move easily between gardens, We can play our part by making a small hole (5 x 5 inches, 125 x 125mm) at ground level in our garden fences and walls for them to get through. This small action can create what’s known as a ‘hedgehog highway’, increasing their foraging and mating prospects.
Lower Sunbury is ideally suited to provide large areas of linked hedgehog habitats, with roads that have many houses with good-sized bordering gardens, some linking to parks, playing fields, school grounds and other open spaces to make even more effective “hedgehog highways”.
If we all make a small effort to enable them to move, and make our gardens more hedgehog-friendly, and if we keep an eye out for them and log sightings, we will know how they’re doing, and potentially make a difference to their population.
We want to cascade this message across the community, through schools, Neighbourhood Watch groups and any other organisations and residents who want to get involved – it’s an ideal project for local residential Whatsapp groups as well. We think the project will appeal to schools as a valuable learning tool and something that students can positively get involved in.
This launch ties in with the British Hedgehog Preservation Society’s Hedgehog Awareness Week from 5th -11th May.
The Project has a Facebook page which you can reach by scanning the QR code or with this address: facebook.com/groups/426944583187007.
All the resources and information you need about helping hedgehogs in your gardens can be found there, along with information as to how record your sightings, and the fact that you have linked your gardens, on a national interactive map called The BIG Hedgehog Map by Hedgehog Street, plus other useful links.
For various reasons, it is not possible at the moment for us to add a dedicated Lower Sunbury Hedgehog Project page to this web site, so the Facebook page is the best resource, although we will add updates and information through the news stories on this site.
This project is initially focused on Lower Sunbury, as that’s the area LOSRA addresses, but obviously hedgehogs don’t know about boundaries, so if anyone from a neighbouring Residents’ Association has a similar project going or wants to start one, we’re happy to share information and experience and work collaboratively.
We hope everyone feels this a worthwhile initiative - we think it could be great way to foster a real community spirit in helping these delightful animals who are on the IUCN ‘Vulnerable to extinction’ red list for British Mammals.
