An assessment of a conservation strategy to increase garden connectivity for hedgehogs that requires cooperation between immediate neighbours: A barrier too far?

Abstract

Urban areas are associated with high levels of habitat fragmentation. For some terrestrial species with limited climbing abilities, property boundaries can pose a significant problem by limiting access to residential gardens. The West European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) has declined markedly in the UK but is commonly found in areas of human habitation, including residential gardens. ‘Hedgehog Street’ is a public engagement campaign aimed at recruiting volunteers (‘Hedgehog Champions’) to create access points (‘hedgehog highways’) across garden boundaries to improve habitat connectivity. In this study, we used a series of questionnaire surveys to explore motivations for and obstacles to the creation of highways. Householders were more likely to have created a highway if they were already aware of the Hedgehog Street campaign, if their garden contained a high number of wildlife-friendly features and if they considered watching wildlife to be important. Hedgehog Champions created, on average, 1.69 highways each with 52.0% creating none; this would equate to an estimated >120,000 across all registered Champions. In comparison, 6.1–29.8% of non-Champions stated that they had made a highway. However, most highways had been created in boundaries that could already be traversed via naturally occurring holes: only 11.4% of garden boundaries could be traversed, and 3.2% of gardens accessed, just via a hedgehog highway. In addition, only 5.0% of gardens were considered totally inaccessible to hedgehogs. The most common reasons cited for not having made a highway were that householders’ gardens were already accessible to hedgehogs followed by concerns relating to boundary ownership and / or communicating with neighbours. Future studies need to identify strategies for overcoming these obstacles to maximize citizen engagement, particularly with those householders who are not innately “wildlife-friendly”, and to quantify the degree to which networks of highways affect patterns of individual movement and, ultimately, populations.

Home Range, Movement, and Nest Use of Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) in an Urban Environment Prior to Hibernation

“…Hedgehogs spend most of the night in the post-mating season to forage [29,35,36], and we therefore suppose that the shorter distance traveled in our study is related to easier access to food. On the other hand, a study in an urban environment in the UK [24] found much higher travel distances than in our study, but gardens in our study were mostly open and easy to access, while urban gardens in the UK are usually smaller and harder to access [65], and this could result in the hedgehogs having to travel longer distances to find sufficient food.…”

Fine-scale habitat selection of a small mammalian urban adapter: the West European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus)

“…Access into and between gardens has been highlighted as a potentially major form of habitat fragmentation for urban hedgehog populations and is the focus of the Hedgehog Street campaign (run by the People's Trust for Endangered Species and British Hedgehog Preservation Society) which aims to persuade householders to create holes in or under their fences to improve inter-garden connectivity (Gazzard et al 2021). Although access into neighbouring back gardens (ACCESS) did not affect proportionate garden use, hedgehogs spent less time in gardens where access from the back garden to the front garden (FRONTTOBACK) was possible.…”

“…Hedgehogs nowadays occur in higher densities in urban settings (Hubert et al 2011;van de Poel et al 2015;Schaus et al 2020) where the risk of predation by badgers appears to be comparatively low (Hubert et al 2011;Pettett et al 2017a) whilst the abundance of anthropogenic foods and nesting opportunities is likely high (Hubert et al 2011;Pettett et al 2017a;Gimmel et al 2021). Nonetheless, urban areas are associated with a range of risks not typically evident in rural landscapes, including disturbance by humans or domestic animals (Rasmussen et al 2019;Rast et al 2019), exposure to urban-associated pollutants and pesticides (Dowding et al 2010b;Taucher et al 2020), barriers to movement created by built structures including roads (Rondinini and Doncaster 2002) and fences (Gazzard et al 2021), and road traffic accidents (Wright et al 2020).…”

What makes a house a home? Nest box use by West European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) is influenced by nest box placement, resource provisioning and site-based factors

“…One of the major factors thought to affect urban hedgehog populations is patterns of connectivity between neighbouring back gardens but also from an individual householder’s front garden to their back garden ( Gazzard et al, 2021 ; App et al, 2022 ; Gazzard, Yarnell & Baker, 2022 ). In this study, nest box use was not significantly affected by the number of neighbouring back gardens which were accessible to hedgehogs from the respondent’s own garden, but front-to-back access was significantly positively correlated with all four patterns of nest box use.…”