Footage from the Hedgehog Camera

By Patrick Wigmore, July 2020, published: 16 July 2023

Here are some videos from the Hedgehog camera. There is no audio in any of these clips.

Hedgehog montage

That’s not a hedgehog!

I called it the Hedgehog Camera because we knew there were hedgehogs in the garden. We’d already seen them. What I didn’t expect was all the other animals that visit during the night. Mice, frogs, rats, other people’s cats.

There seemed to be at least four different cats that visited the garden, although two of them visited much more frequently.

Making hedgehogs

What’s not shown here is that, a little while after this video was recorded, two juvenile hedgehogs began to appear on camera.

Other observations

I found it particulary interesting to see where exactly the hedgehogs went, and in what sequence. I kept moving the camera around to try and capture different parts of their journeys. They had predictable routes, methodically scouring the ground for food, but would occasionally travel the same routes in a different sequence.

I wanted to find out where the hedgehogs were nesting, but it was incredibly difficult to pinpoint it, even with clear footage of the hedgehogs moving about. There were a few suspected nesting sites, but not wanting to risk disturbing them I was never able to confirm these. On the whole, I think they tended to nest in one of our neighbours’ garden and came to ours to look for food.

I never figured out where the hedgehogs went to hibernate, either.

Seeing the behaviour of the hedgehogs was also interesting. I’d never heard of a hedgehog rolling another hedgehog along before, nor seen the interactions between parent and child.

Reviewing the footage

What was less interesting was watching all the footage to see what was in it. Between November 2020 and January 2022, I collected more than 17900 individual files, amounting to over 42GiB after reencoding and totalling more than 71 hours. Being generous, only about a fifteenth of it actually contained anything of note, of which I shortlisted about 26 minutes worth to consider for inclusion here, before whittling it down to the three videos above.

About the only reasonable way to review it all was to wait until I had, say, a week’s worth of footage and then watch the whole lot at high speed, with one finger hovering over the spacebar, ready to pause the playback if something interesting appeared.

Most of the recordings seemed to have been triggered by something off-camera, or something which had already run away. Windy nights always produced much more footage because leaves blowing in the wind would also trigger the motion sensor. This superfluous footage had the side benefit of showing that the motion sensor wasn’t missing much animal activity on non-windy nights.

Still, it was very exciting the first time something new popped up on camera.

But, even the footage that did contain animals started to feel repetitive after a while!