Hogs on Film (HOF) is a grass-roots community project aimed at understanding and educating the public on all things hedgehog!
HOF began in August 2023, when, as a PhD research student, I noticed that despite the fact there is a growing community of people who film and feed hedgehogs in their back gardens, there is a distinct lack of published information available for researchers to access. Meaning, we are left in the dark when it comes to understanding how urban hedgehog behaviors are changing in their new town and city environments... whilst numerous people up and down the country are experts in hedgehog-home-video and have been watching them for years!
HOF aims to bridge that gap, by providing people who are already feeding and filming their garden wildlife with a platform to share and contribute their data towards urban hedgehog research. By taking part, and becoming 'citizen scientists' members of the public can contribute towards our research, learn and in turn, access new research and get involved with public engagement events and seminars.
During 2024 I made it to The Mammal Society's annual conference to present some of our 2023 data, met with some of our participants at the Restore Nature Now protest march in June, presented a seminar on all things hedgehog at BBOWT's Nature Discovery Centre in Thatcham and will be presenting work at The British Ecological Society's annual conference in December. It has been a very busy year for us collecting data and collating our findings and I am hoping to make 2025 even bigger and better for HOF; with more public engagement events, workshops and educational outreach planned!
Most of my research focuses on understanding the diets of urban hedgehogs, understanding what is being provided, how the hedgehogs are interacting at their food source, the composition and manufacture of 'hedgehog food' and its nutritional content. I have aims of finding the best brands and producing guidance in order to enable our nature loving public to make the most hedgehog-friendly choices.
Its not just hedgehogs who visit our gardens too! During one year we had reports of:
- 2820 hedgehogs
- 402 slugs
- 378 cats
- 279 rats/mice
- 187 foxes
- 168 birds
- 24 squirrels
- 4 ‘others’ which included a polecat, and 3 shrews!
Help us to bring our project to the masses!
We are a registered 'non-profit' community interest company and have a very small team. The project has been entirely self-funded by myself (Lea) up until this point. In September 2024 we successfully registered as a non-profit organization and were able to open a bank account and are now ready to raised the funds needed to take our project further!
Where will my money go?
Any money generated will contribute towards the ongoing upkeep and improvement of our website; hosting is expensive, particularly when handling large amounts of data and requiring ample storage. Our goal is to create a means to capture all the brilliant conservation action that goes on in our gardens, so that the unsung hero's feeding our nightly foragers can ensure their data isn't lost, and to help close that gap between those at home and the research community.