Juvenile Hedgehog

This year I didn’t see any family groups visiting the garden during the late spring or early summer and I guess it’s now largely past this point.

What I did see over the last week though was a noticeably smaller hedgehog, I guess it must be a young, newly independent individual on some of it’s first solo nightime forays.

Then one night it did turn up accompanied by a much larger hedgehog, I initially assumed that it was the mother.

But this wasn’t the case as shown below.

The larger hedgehog was a male that spend a large part of the night trying and failing to mate with this young juvenile.

Hedgehogs can mate starting from their first spring. This would be next spring for a hedgehog born this year, as it doesn’t really emerge and become independent until the summer.

So too early for the youngster in this video.