I am happy to report that Miss Tiggywinkle is doing much better now that she has moved to her new digs, an outdoor 40’ square pen with trees and tall grass. We were very worried about her last week but this week she is over the hump and hopefully will someday be completely free, once we are sure that she can feed herself without assistance.

Several days ago, we introduced a very wild, Mr. Tiggywinkle, to her in hopes that he would teach her the ways of the bush, how to catch her own dudus, (insects in Kiswahili) and to forage at night. As soon as we put the hissing little ball of prickly spines in with her he immediately snuggled up hoping for a cuddle and got a cold shoulder. Poor little thing!

I put two of our woven grass table mats over a large hole as shelter, a make shift house for them, in the middle of the small paddock. Within 30 minutes Miss Tiggs had waddled out and down the hill as far as she could go leaving him to the house. The next day she was back in the house – alone. Today he has the house. Seems the two will not share, not surprising since hedgehogs are not a gregarious species, but we had hoped that there would be enough interaction to teach Miss Tiggs a thing or two about the bush.

We put a kerosene lamp in the middle of the pen at night to attract insects since they don’t have a wide terrain in which to forage and I supplement this with a very small amount of cooked duck cut into tiny hedgehog bite size pieces. Our home ground ducks are low in fat and Mr. and Mrs. devour it like a juicy grasshopper without the fight.

Mr. Tiggywinkle will be released very soon so we don’t disrupt his diet and habits too much. Time will tell if she learned anything from him during his brief visit or not. At least his presence is encouraging her to travel around the pen which can’t be bad for our not so over weight little girl. She is looking pretty good these days!