Weird Winter Weather ...

This winter sure has been a strange one. It was late arriving and has ebbed and flowed, never really settling down into 'proper' sustained cold temperatures. Couple that with a prolonged, very hot summer and you get a hedgehog rescue scenario that hasn't really tapered off as it should have done.

Charlie, fast asleep in his hibernation nest

Charlie's hibernation has been a real education for me and I wonder how closely it is tracking the hibernation of wild hogs. It is quite different to Sonny's which is prolonged and almost uninterupted ... hmmm, maybe Charlie is just a glutton - he has woken up regularly throughout his hibernation in order to eat ... and certainly hasn't read the manual on hibernation which states that hogs are supposed to lose weight during their hibernation; usually about 10gms/week. To date, Charlie has lost exactly 5gms! Or maybe it just hasn't been cold enough to fully penetrate Charlie's impressive layer of blubber for any length of time so he keeps waking up.

Anyway, due to the weird weather we are getting a lot of older juveniles with severe mange coming in. How on earth they have kept going for this long is beyond me ... These teens would have been born in the Autumn and have struggled along all winter.

Last weekend I assisted a rescuer; Maritha, with a little hoggie she had found when out for a walk. Freddie weighed in at 316gms and has bad mange. He's being looked after by Maritha and is up and down, but still with us. Then this afternoon I had another call from Maritha - she had found another hoggie! When she asked what on earth was going on - finding another one so quickly, I explained that once you found/rescued one the word gets out and the hoggies come looking for you!

Kero, the face of misery and suffering

Maritha couldn't manage to care for a second hog so I got her to bring him to me and here he is - We've called him Kero as Geri is watching anime tonight and a character named Kero is in it.
Kero tips the scales at 450gms but should be at least 800-1000gms. If you look at the photo, you'll see how tiny his body is compared to his head. It's quite disturbing really, poor we guy. He has very severe mange is is really stinky. But, if he makes it through the night we'll start treatment tomorrow and his state will start to improve pretty fast after that.

After he arrived, I warmed Kero up some more on a heatpad - Maritha had done a great job giving him a hottie to snuggle up to so he wasn't ice cold when he arrived. I then offered him some electrolytes and he drank steadily for about 20 minutes. Next up was a feed of the magic AD/Puppy formula which he tucked into until he couldn't fit any more in. His tummy was discernibly rounder by the time he finished. He's now asleep on a heatpad in his hospital box. I'll wake him up once more before I go to bed to see if he'll have some more to eat and drink and then we'll keep out fingers crossed and will see what the morning brings. If he makes it through the night, he'll have an oil drizzle tomorrow, I'll start his Ivomec injections - if I can find a spot of clear skin on his back which looks like concrete at the moment, and he'll start Panacur as well. If I can't find a spot I'll wait 24 hours for  some of his crust to fall away and then jab him.

Mr Podgy aka Hector

 The speed of the transformation once the hog receives treatment and decent nutrition is really quite astounding as is evidenced here by Mr Hector. Let's hope that Kero can pull through so that his real hoggie self can be revealed.

Hector with his new quills coming through - loves to 'splat' on his heatpad