Two Hobbyists, a Hedgehog Rescue, and an Exciting Hedgehog Tracking Project (Project HEDGE) - EMF 20

Hi, I'm Andy Cook. I'm Dian's husband and uh I do as I'm told. >> If only that were the case. So, basically, we just want to really briefly tell you about Pickly Pig's Hedgehog Rescue and how we got started. So, it all happened because of COVID. So during the first lockdown, unfortunately myself and Andrew found ourselves out of work. So we couldn't uh go out to work, but we were left at home um trying to homeschool our two children. So obviously we had a lot of spare hands on our time, spare time on our hands. So we decided what could we do with that time um to make it a bit more productive. So we decided that we would start a hedgehog rescue. So, previously to that, we were um rescuing and we were releasing and we were uh fostering hedgehogs from another rescue. But we decided to start our own rescue and that's how Prickly Pigs came about. We did though at first say that we only wanted to have three hedgehogs in the rescue at once because obviously normally we would be working and obviously got the family life. Anyway, it didn't quite work out like that. And by the end of that first year in 2020, we had taken in over 120 hedgehogs into the rescue. So we had to uh we had to rethink. So what happened was at the beginning of lockdown, Andrew spent an awful lot of time in our garage. He was there had that extra time to rebuild his man cave. We had dust extraction systems. We had all his tools organized. He got out his um screw fix catalog collection of every type of screw and nail that you can imag imagine you ever needed and was getting it all organized. Unfortunately, because the number of hedgehogs that we had in the rescue escalated so much, we had to rethink what we were going to do with them. So, unfortunately, Andrew's man cave um had to be replaced by a rescue. So we converted our garage into the rescue. So where are we at today? Well, at the moment um this year we've taken in lots of hedgehogs and annually now we take in about 500 hedgehogs into the rescue. I've not returned back to work because I'm running the rescue now full-time. We are a registered charity and uh we are looking at fundraising to expand the rescue further and replace our bit of dilapidated garage at our peak. So at our peak last year at one point in July we had roughly 96 hedgehogs in the rescue at one time. So what we do in the rescue is we anybody finds a hedgehog that's sick or injured or they think's poorly or orphaned, then they can get in touch with us. We take that hedgehog in, find out what's wrong with it, treat it, rehabilitate it, and then of course they get released back into the wild, usually where they've come from. When we do release all our hedgehogs, we microchip them. So, we know that if a hedgehog was to come back into the rescue, we could scan it and then we could find out about lots of um other things that might be wrong with it um and compare it to when it came in last time. Now, that moment of release is always the best bit of course, but it's always leaves us wondering what's happened to those that we have um had through the rescue. Are they surviving? Are they doing better or worse than uh hedgehogs that haven't been into the rescue? Do they stay near the rel release sites or are they struggling um a little bit more? We just don't really know. Why is it not changing the slides? So, our first return patient uh was a hedgehog called Adira. She'd been into the rescue, been rehabilitated and released back into the wild, but uh not long afterwards. Um she arrived with um a massive abscess around the top of her head. We drained her abscess, we treated it, microchipped it, and released it. But 13 days later, she came back into the rescue. She'd been attacked unfortunately by a very large dog and had actually got a broken leg. So, we've got the X-ray and um she's wearing this splint here. Now, she was ready for release, but um of course, as soon as she was nearly ready for release, she decided that she was going to pop out babies. So, uh she had to stay with us even longer. So, the gestation period of a hedgehog is roughly 30 days. Now, what we started doing then was we started going out into our garden where we had a feeding station set up and we were having our microchip reader and we were stalking the hedgehogs in our garden, scanning them as quickly as we could to see whether they were microchipped ones or whether they were any other kind of ones so that we could see which hedgehogs were actually visiting our garden. We also kind of took it a little bit further, didn't we? And we would often be found roaming the streets of Otley late at night with a torch and a microchip reader seeing if we could actually find any more microchips, hedgehogs that we had released across um Otley. Now, obviously the more hedgehogs we released to a wider area, obviously we couldn't cover that area on foot. So we were only being able to actually um walk around our local area, not so further. So surely there was a better way of actually finding out about where our hedgehogs were that we had microchipped them. So the question was, Andrew, can you make something that reads a microchip when it comes into our feeding station? then I don't have to stay up all night looking at hedgehogs or actually get the risk of um getting arrested while we're skulking around in the dark at night. And that's how Project Hedge began. Hedgehog electronic data gathering evaluation [applause] and I hand over to Andrew. So of course my instant response was if I had a man cave I could do this but I don't anymore. So by this time we're now getting 500 patients a year. [clears throat] Not all of those get released in Otley itself. They get released in the local towns and we were vastly expanding where we were getting hedgehogs from. Dian wanted >> everything. Sorry >> everything. My background is as a as a as a project manager. I'm trying to ma manage Diane, my client, uh, in the best way I can. But she wanted so she wanted passive long-term monitoring, low maintenance and costs. We wanted a public interface in time that would encourage people to view hedgehogs and look out look out for them, uh, feed them and generally it needed to be automatic or semi-automatic because our time's precious. So we started out with various proof of concepts. The university leadeds wanted to get on board. So we worked with some of their research students in terms of GIS mapping on the hedgehogs that were coming in uh and the the data that we were collecting from our relatively simple proof of concept models. They range from manual skills with a camera to track the scales to digital scales >> to a bit of a blue pizza job there with a lot of um double-sided sticky tape. >> Yeah. >> Yes, that is a male hedgehog there. As you can see, the system worked really quite well, but it was inside the box. And here's a hedgehog coming out of the box. Uh, so this is Paul, actually. Paul the hedgehog, obviously, uh, leaving one of our hedgehog stations. So, Paul was a hedgehog that was in the rescue and um, he uh, we don't get bitten by hedgehogs very often, but he did like the taste of my fingers. Um, and he was released though. However, uh to release site, uh uh 880 m away from the rescue. It only took him uh 13 days to actually find the feeding stage back in back in our garden. Personally, I think that he was just looking for my blood again. So, hedgehogs are not the cleanest of animals. And when you congregate them into a single point feed, mayhem and shoes. So you can see how dirty it is in there. We had to change the the the deployed prototype to be much easier to clean. So the weighing scales had to go. By this time, we're already starting to learn Node Red, Arduino IDE, uh the K card, databases, and how it use a laser cutter. It was meant to be something simple. Nothing's ever simple in your world though, is it? >> No. >> And of course, we needed a back end to record all the information that was there. So, that's one of the hedgehogs coming out the TV station. >> You They always say hello to the camera. They're quite vague. So the team's not just just myself. There's a colleague of mine, John Duffy, who works who is a a member of Warale Menshed. Menshed is a fantastic organization uh supporting uh gentleman worth looking up about what they do. Um my conversation with John went something along the lines of we need to work lean, John, but we need to be agile. Every situation needed to be defined by scope, but we also needed to be be able to adapt to anything that Diane wanted. And of course, it definitely had to be minimal viable product. Uh, another important member of the team. Um, this is this is Rhubarb. He is our only long-term resident of the rescue. He is uh a rather neurode divergent hedgehog, hence why he is actually lives at the rescue. Uh because unfortunately or fortunately for him, he thinks he's a cat more than a hedgehog. So he is um the chief tester. So he was testing um all our um prototypes. He was chief brisket cruncher and of course the CEO of it all. So, what we ended up doing is we ended up having a long-term test station that was at our h our house where the res rescue is based and then we also had um several other uh prototypes that we were able to put around our volunteers gardens um for short-term monitoring to test out um basically what what was happening and what we were finding. So, um, we had, um, we had a 12-month period where at the feeding station in our garden, which was long-term there, actually had 2536 visits from 26 individual hedgehogs. Here's just some of the data that we've picked out from that long-term um long-term tracking station um at the rescue and also some of the satellite ones as well. So, we had Sprout. Sprout came to us in uh 2021. It was um an abandoned hoglet only weighing about 50 grams. We treated it, released it, reared it, and then it was released on the 21st of March 2021 and was tracked in our tracking station in August of 2024. So, we know that that hedgehog sprout is just about 3 years, well over three years old. The average lifespan of a hedgehog is in the wild is 3 to five years. And the the data and research that we know so far about hedgehogs is that generally they stay within a 15 um 15 garden radius. Generally they can walk up to 2 miles a night. Obviously not in a straight line and um which seems to be that males seem to travel further. But those basics that we know already, we're starting to disprove from the research that we've been able to get from our tracking system. So, we had another one here, Wink. He was released in uh 2022. And then 2 years and 21 days later, he was spotted um in another garden down um on a different part of the estate. And then again, he was tracked in uh February of 2025. So it was lovely. You cannot imagine what it was like when that first hedgehog went through that tracking station. We got all the data back and it told us who it was. To know that that hedgehog that we' taken in and spent so much time and effort and care um treating it and rehabilitating it and then it's still out there in the wild doing really well is the best thing ever. We also had um Meowth. Now, uh, Meowth hasn't actually been in the rescue. If you remember earlier, I said a little bit about how, um, we kind of stalked the hedgehogs in our garden. Well, Meowth was one that we stalked in our garden. So, it was living in our garden or at least passed through our garden in the May of 2023 and surprisingly enough was tracked to one of our trial um trial tracking stations in October 2023 where 160 days later, but in a completely different town. So, Meowth was a female hedgehog as well. So, not a male hedgehogs that walked further, but Meowth was a female hedgehog. So she had traveled obviously as the crowfly 2,800 meters and cross the river warf as well. Hedgehogs by the way can swim. >> It's just slow. >> Is it just slow? [snorts] Right. So, what did we learn from the first 12 months? Slugs are a real hazard to electronics. I don't know what it is about PCBs, but they love them. And even at low voltage, they can shrivel up quite comfortably on a PCB. >> So, unfortunately, several slugs were actually harmed in the development of this system. Our biggest challenges weren't really technical to be fair. It was weather exposure realities of trying to maintain a system out in the field that you're not getting active feedback from. The units were integrated and we had to crawl around on our hands and knees to maintain them or completely bring them back out of the rain uh home. So, this is Huffy, our mascot. He does live with us occasionally, and he may or may not be my alter ego. So, we decided we needed we needed something. It had to be easy to clean. We needed something that we could maintain in the field or remove the components quickly, take them away, and just do a quick swap. And also we have to work out because these are going to deployed in with members of the public. How are they going to clean them? How are they going to maintain them safely? And there is certain certain uh bacterias that can be passed between humans to hedgehogs and vice versa. And we have to put all those controls in place. By this time the number of software packages that we had to learn suddenly increased dramatically. None of these were things that I'd done before. None of them some of them what John had done but mainly we started the development of the pro product after the years years uh long deployment to see how we could make it how we could improve it easier to deploy and easier to to maintain. All I wanted was, you know, for a hedgehog just to be scanned and then me just to get an email in the morning to tell me who it was. You know, all this other fancy other systems, you know, it's just not necessary. >> Minimal viable product. That's what us PMS always worked to. So, how did we get there? So, our eldest child, Jasper, they designed us an entrance way. We wanted something that looked pretty. So we transferred that into an electronic drawing and then we 3D printed it >> which is really where minimal viable product really sort of kind of stops. >> Yeah. The electric, the electronics went through about 14 uh uh different deployments and different changes. Some on uh uh Veraboard, multiple ones that we had uh produced uh manufactured off site and then soldered the components to. But we needed to do some battery optimization. So you might be wondering why I'm hobbling around with a cane. It's that car battery and the other five others that I was humping around to recharge that probably did it. We didn't focus on battery optimization first because we needed to prove the technology worked. Prove that we could reliably and consistently read the hedgehog RFID tags. We now use just our blue battery pack. We've gone from 20 days worth of a battery pack from 20 days worth from the car battery to 40 days with the lithium ion pack and now we've added solar and a solar controller uh uh and battery management system and it now runs indefinitely in the UK without any external power needed. And this is project hedge. As you can see, what we wanted was a product that used standardized components or components that we were in control of. Every part of this design we're in control of, whether it's the electronics, the software, the laser cutting, we have all the master bits and pieces, the camera units on there. One is a is a blink camera unit, and the other one is for a the host of the unit to have their own camera in there if they wish. So we needed a name. We've got project hedge as the whole project. But now we have a we had a product and of course it had to be edge operational gateway sits on the edge of the of the operation links into our back edge and but it was too long. So we shortened that to edge og which as we say up north >> edgeog. >> So our edgeog unit out in the wild we've now built 20 of these. We've got about six deployed so far and we're about to um >> Thank you. Let's hide it. >> Uh deploy the the the remaining of the 20 and we're looking for funding and private sponsors to build the the remaining. Uh the British Hedgehog Preservation Society were very kind to sponsor 20 of the units to be built and funded majority of the cost of this project. So how does it work? Dead simple obviously. Hedgehog enters, unit wakes up, scans the chip, photo taken, time and date logged, sends us the data via home Wi-Fi, and then it's collected in a backend database. >> And then a happy wife. >> And a happy wife. Yeah. But we didn't just track hedgehogs. Sometimes we had other visitors. And birds turned out to be one of the biggest pests. Who knew that they liked cat food as much as hedgehogs? And of course, we got the occasional mouse as well. That's a slug it sniffing. But no, no creature, including hedgehogs, really really wants to eat a slug. It's always a last resort. Oh, that one. >> And of course, magpies are just as tenacious as blackbirds, if not more. And of course, >> aliens from outer space came to visit as well. >> Now, they're the least of our problems. Cats. We spend a great deal of time sizing the hole to stop a cat from going in. [laughter] >> Okay, >> play it again. >> Do you want to see that again? Oh, technical error. I'm not used to a tracker pad. car bit played again because I don't know what I'm doing with it. There you go. >> So, we had actually prototyped and obviously tested lots and lots of different size holes um to make sure the cats don't get in and obviously eat the cat food that we are putting in the rescue. So, yeah. So, the the um feeding stations um do have uh wet cat food. That's what we feed the hedgehogs in the rescue. Wet cat food, wet dog food, cat miscuits, and water. And that's what we leave in in our tracking station or our feeding station in our garden um for all our prickly friends to come and visit. So obviously the key thing was making sure that our own two cats who obviously tell everybody that they are completely starved and neglected and they're only ever fed if they can eat the hedgehog's food um couldn't actually get in there. So we tried loads and loads of different contraptions. We had tunnels, we had pipes going round, we had flaps, we had obstructions in the way. But this one particular cat in our neighborhood, it didn't matter what we did, the still the little so and so could still get in there. And it wasn't until we actually just decreased the size of the hole that made the difference. So we reduced the size of the hole. So yes, on this one here, a cat's head can get it in can get in. If we have a long box and put the food at the back, then um obviously a cat can still get its arm in there but just not can't reach the food. So that's what we that's how we developed it. But of course obviously cats do come in different shapes and sizes. And uh a slimline cat obviously can get itself in if it squeezes in tightly, but obviously can't get out as quickly and as easily as it got in. So we don't see project hedge as something to keep to ourselves. I've got a full-time job. Darian runs looks after hedgehogs. We want to develop a system that people can add on to it and ultimately once the funding period is gone, we can be open source for everybody to use. We'll provide the back end to researchers. Uh they can purchase the units or build their own or somebody else can add on to it and we'll deal with all the backend bits and they just end up with standardized clean data that we can use. So um obviously Andrew's already mentioned that um the British Hydro Preservation Society were really interested in uh what we were doing and obviously all the data and research that we could get from our tracking stations. So they helped to fund what we do and obviously keeping a close eye on it as well. Warfdale's menshed obviously John there has been a vital role um and he has kept how he's kept his patience with Andrew I really do not know um but he is still on board with us. And then of course the University of Leeds and all their students who are actually taking all of this information from the tracking station plus all of our other data we've got from our hedgehogs as to what what weight they came in, what was wrong with them, what parasites have they got so that they can then generate some research um projects and obviously hopefully um know that everybody else can share that information. There's no sound. You're just wanting a nice bit of peace and quiet to have some tea. That was a hedgehog there. Um, entering one of our volunteers garden where we've got a tracking station. It came through just on that left hand side where they've got a hole in their uh fence where uh they've made a hedgehog highway. hedgehog comes in and he certainly knows exactly where the food is in the tracking station. So that's the end of our presentation. So thank you very much for listening. We will be going over to the um Q&A bit if anybody was has any questions at all about um what we do. Obviously you've probably gathered that I don't really know very much about all this stuff, but I obviously do know lots about hedgehogs. If you just want to come and ask any questions, general questions about hedgehog. Andrew knows all this this stuff. Here we have got with us um some leaflets if you want to take a leaflet about how you can help hedgehogs. Uh we have got our hedgehog sticker, but we've also just for um this weekend got our own space themed hedgehog sticker as well. So if you would like if you would like a sticker or a leaflet or come and chat to us, then we're heading over that way. or if you do see us at any point during the weekend and we've got our t-shirts on, we don't mind talking about hedgehogs to anybody as well as having our family workshop um tomorrow uh where we've got lots and lots of hedgehogy crafts for um family members to do.