No, not the video yet, I'm sorry. But you do get a screenshot... 

...and you only get this for a blog post today, because I was at a nice presentation with lunch afterwards, and the rest of the day slipped into this and that and now I'm sending out the info about the Textile Forum registration being online. Hooray! 

It really feels like summer currently - and it's definitely "thirsty weather". We've started placing a flat bowl of water outside every night when we stack the hedgehog snackhouse, and it has definitely been appreciated: 

Quite a few of the guys go for a snack, then a drink; some only come for the water. The Early Hedgehog, who turns up sometime between nine and ten, usually only eats and runs away, but it's quite possible that he has some other source of water.

The pointy guys are definitely enjoying their tiny pool, though! Some go on to drink for the full two minutes that the camera records at a time. By contrast, the birdbath that we installed already last year gets pointedly ignored...

 There's another long weekend coming up - so I'll be back on the blog on Monday. Meanwhile, if this video upload thingie has worked, you can enjoy a hedgehog checking out the feeding station in our garden:

Yesterday was too hectic to get a picture in here - but now you are getting a view of the catproofed hedgehog restaurant: 

The stone goes on top of the roof/lid for the night, otherwise at least one of the cats will lift it off. (We saw him trying on one of the videos. Before he gave up on that method and contorted himself in through the door opening.) 

And this is how the inside looks:

I'm still impressed that the cats managed to squeeze around that corner. It's only about 11 or so cm wide, after all. 

The center space should be large enough for two hedgehogs to turn around each other (which should be possible here), and the food houses need two separate entrances so there's always a way to flee, in case there are disagreements about who is supposed to be in there, and who is not. That makes those food houses surprisingly large. Instead of adding the two sewage tube knees, some plans recommend closing off the entrance labyrinth paths on top, making them only about 12 cm in height, so it's more like a tunnel. We considered that option, but went for the knees - as we did not trust the cat burglars to get stopped by a little bit of a height inconvenience.

And yes, what you see in that dish is no more food, and some hedgehog droppings instead. They have a weird way of saying "thank you for the food", those guys! 

This is, supposedly, a hedgehog feeding station with a cat-proof design. Which means that a hedgehog can enter, and leave, and there's two entrances/exits so if two should happen to go in there at the same time, a route to run away is still open to each of them. (Hedgehogs are not social, as a rule.)

The inside has two partitioning walls so it's like something that dreams of being a labyrinth one day. But, well, you know, it's not complicated enough yet. That is supposed to make it cat-proof, because even if a cat is able to stick their head in, they would not crawl in all the way, with only 10 cm of door height, and then contort themselves around the inner walls to reach the food plate.

Well, well, well. My aunt kindly borrowed us her wildlife camera, and after seeing this:

I'm not so sure anymore about that "cat-proof" thing. The cat goes inside until just the tip of the tail sticks out, and then the data cuts off.

We know that cat, it's a slim, rather young-looking tom with a very beautiful ginger tabby fur. Apparently he's trying to work on the "slim" part with enthusiasm... 

So we'll have to find a way to pimp the cat-proofness. Maybe add something so the entrance is more like a tunnel? That would make slipping inside more awkward.

Well. Nothing utterly new, or such things. I'm more or less trying to prep the next event (a workshop for a volunteer group at a museum), get the image database updated and finally transferred to the new system (fingers crossed nothing will explode there), and try to get more done on the other open or have-to-be-maintenanced things.

Yesterday evening was mainly spent on preparing a new batch of cat food, so Madame can go on having food she enjoys (a little too much, at times), and we spent part of our lunch break today outside photo-hunting insects and obsidentifying them.

Have I mentioned that app before? It's what we use these days to identify plants or animals that we don't know. It's usually quite good and quite reliable - sometimes there are hallucinations, but these are typically easy to catch. The app is called "Obsidentify", here's the website with information about it, and by using it you become a citizen scientist (or, in this case, more a citizen science minion) helping to track species and, via that, climate change and other changes in habitats.

We now know that there's a special kind of aphids hanging out on willows. In our case, that's also the meeting place and orgy location for a lot of Asian Ladybugs... or, as we call it, the "Ladybug Swinger Club".

The little hedgehog is about ready to roam free again - with continued support in form of food offers. (There's just too few insects out and about for them to find enough food when just foraging. Feel free to google about the loss of insect mass in the last years, but sit down before you do.) So we built a cat-safe hedgehog food station and it had the first trial run yesterday.

This morning, when I went to take out the food bowl, I found this: 

I had not thought that hedgehogs were such scathing restaurant critics! Good thing the little prickly lady does not have internet access, or we'd probably have found a zero star google review as well.

(Hedgehog station told me that they quite like to do that. I guess it's no problem when you are roaming and just drop your thank-you where you ate the bugs, but dropped in a plate, it does have a defintitive comical value.)