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Hedgehog threat to wildlife growing Hedgehogs seem to have got away with murder for a long time. Like the rabbit, many people see them as cute and harmless, whereas in fact they are voracious predators of our native wildlife. Stoats, rats, cats and possums are usually the main targets of trapping programmes. There’s plenty of video footage of possums eating birds’ eggs, and cats sneaking up on nesting birds at night. The high-profile predator removal operations on offshore islands focus (quite rightly) on rats and mice – usually hedgehogs aren’t present on these islands. But that lack of publicity has perhaps stopped us from acknowledging the true pest status of the humble hedgehog. Hedgehogs are carnivores and are known to eat birds’ eggs, lizards, insects and the endangered native snail. A study near Twizel in the Mackenzie which looked at the stomach contents of hedgehogs found that they contained 15 per cent birds,
Mary Ralston
FOREST AND BIRD
9 per cent lizard parts and the remainder insects such as small weta, grasshoppers, earwigs, grass grubs and beetles. Also in the Twizel area, hedgehogs were responsible for 19 per cent of “lethal events” (where eggs, chicks or adults were destroyed) that happened to a colony of ground-nesting banded dotterels, black-fronted terns and stilts. Cats were responsible for 40 per cent of the predation, ferrets 22 per cent, stoats 5 per cent, sheep 3 per cent (by trampling) and magpies and harriers 2 per cent each. All the predation by the hedgehogs was of eggs. This is a very significant loss due to hedgehogs. And it seems they are very
from 11 to 43ha. They like to dodge the winter weather and hibernate for about three months over the winter. Hedgehogs prefer lowland pastoral and forest areas but are found in the high country too. Locally, hedgehogs are now frequently caught in the traps set around Lake Heron to protect the crested grebe and other native wildlife. Ross Gordon, of the Lake Heron Trapping Group, says that hedgehogs were rarely caught when the trapping programme began eight or so years ago, but now they are the most common catch. “We are definitely catching a lot more of them than we were before; sometimes 20 per Hedgehogs are voracious predators of our native wildlife. PHOTO LUC HOOGENSTEIN month. Since we began the trapping up there we would have caught hundreds.” widespread and there’s a the most common of the Perhaps the warmer lot of them: in the North mammals found there. winters are conducive to the Island, 400 hedgehogs were Hedgehogs have really big hedgehogs’ rise in numbers trapped from within a colony territories although they in the high country or maybe of beach-nesting dotterels spend most of their time in a north of Auckland, and 760 much smaller core area. In the there’s another explanation. In hedgehogs were trapped in the Twizel study, males ranged a place where there’s not just past three years from around over an average of 38ha in the native birds to protect, but the periphery of a 368ha autumn, but up to 100ha in the native skinks and insects too, care forspring yourand carsummer before you get we it. need to do all we can to get forest reserve thatWe protects breeding kiwi. Next to rats, And they were season;after femaleyou territories now years get itwent too. rid of them.
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