Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry Christmas everyone - and a big thank you to everyone who has supported us, in any way, this year.   

Penny and Jane

“2025 has been an amazing year for us,” says Penny Hunt, Co-Founder. “We are doing our annual count of all the animals we have cared for this year.  We haven’t got the final number yet, but we know it far exceeds the number of animals we looked after in 2024. For us, it’s not just about saving the life of each individual animal, but giving that animal the chance to reproduce in the wild, helping to keep its species stronger than it would be if that animal had died.  We’ve got a lot to be proud about this year.”

“We end 2025 on a real high in many ways,” adds Jane Carpenter, Co-Founder. “So much has happened this year.  We appointed the wonderful Patrick Grant as our first Patron; Pat, Penny, Jill and Vanessa as new Trustees; had Fia join us as our volunteer vet; and grew and continued to train our fabulous team of volunteers - such a big step forward on all counts!  But we end the year with the news that our premises are likely to be put up for sale.  It’s very difficult entering 2026 with uncertainty.”

“Jane and I, and the whole team, wanted to thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for the support you give us,” says Penny.  “Whether it’s free expertise, your time, the use of your transport, animal and bird food, equipment, cash donations, grants and anything else we have forgotten to mention, it’s absolutely fabulous.  None of this would be possible without your donations. Thanks for joining us on our journey this year, wishing you a happy and peaceful end of the year surrounded by friends and family.”

And here, in Penny’s words, is how the year looked, in rescue ‘seasons’.   We are gearing up for 2026, whatever it brings.

January shifts are cold; there is no heating in our building, so whatever you can wear to keep warm and lots of movement helps! While some hedgehogs have hibernated in our care we always try to get them out before hibernation.  For some, though, it’s impossible and, despite our best efforts with heat pads and disturbance, the urge to hibernate is too much and they curl up. They get hissy and cross, like tired teenagers, then stop complaining and curl up tight. At this point we leave them.  It’s not good to disturb hibernating hedgehogs, so they get peace until they are ready to wake up again. However, some are too small or too ill to hibernate so we always have hedgehogs awake through the winter, to look after.

The owls in particular come in all through the winter, mostly car accidents, some just found grounded. Other birds and animals get injured or fall ill, but this is our quiet period, our time to catch up on admin and make plans for the coming year and how we want to develop. We have 43 volunteers who work in teams on shifts morning and evening 365 days a year, plus our 31 transport volunteers who collect animals for us from across the 500 plus miles of our area. Training volunteers, while ongoing during the year, is more concentrated in this quieter period with lots of volunteers on externally provided courses as well as the training we run in-house.

We use these quieter winter months to prepare for the onslaught in Spring, getting the pens ready for the hordes of ducklings who signal the start of the year. Hedgehogs already in our care, wake up and are quick to put on the required weight for release, so then we are left with a handful of creatures. Every day we wonder when the first ducking will arrive. They were later this year, we really thought we were so ready - until the phone rang, “first three on their way in”… we’d forgotten quite how impossibly small they are and they tried to escape through the tiny holes in the bars! Gradually they build.  We took over 80 ducklings in last Spring, putting them in little groups as they bond together and move through a range of pens, from inside heated caging to different stages of outside, then freedom.

The chaos of Spring comes thick and fast, often 20 or 30 orphaned or injured babies arriving daily, last year we felt we were drowning under nestlings and fledglings.  We put a call out for people to help us but failed to get back to those lovely people who volunteered as we just didn’t have the time to do anything about it. We are preparing now for next year! Nestlings often need feeding every 20 mins from 7am to 10pm, and so many of our volunteers had babies at home. Tiny hedgehogs and rabbits need incubators.  They get special formula fed through syringes every couple of hours, again impossible to keep on top of at the rescue so volunteers' homes and lives fill with feeding and cleaning up after babies of all varieties. Some babies feed all through the night, waking up every couple of hours to be fed, so these we have to share. 

It’s impossible to keep night feeds going every few hours for weeks and still hold down a job, let alone have a life, so we try to have a couple of foster mums, keeping the numbers limited for the sake of the animals.

By summer the night pressures are easing, but the first youngsters are leaving their nests and heading into the world. Then the babies and juveniles start to appear, often very cold, undernourished and ill. The summer months are spent helping those youngsters back to health. We sometimes have babies born at the rescue as we are treating their mums, they get kept in the maternity wing, where they can grow up quietly and peacefully away from the general rescue room.

By Autumn many animals and birds have been released again, but then our worst period starts, Autumn juvenile season. Second litters that would once have thrived in abundant hedgerows and gardens now have insufficient food around, so eat the wrong things just to put food into their empty tummies. They come in with all of the parasites we ever see, in one tiny body. It’s very much a race against time to keep these little ones alive long enough for the drugs to work. Each year in late Autumn we are impacted by bird flu regulations and all the rules surrounding it. We are very much on the frontline in terms of people bringing sick birds to us so have many protocols, quarantine zones, PPE, outside triage and everything in place to keep our birds and our volunteers safe.

Gradually as the year ends the rescue empties out, animals are still released during the winter if the conditions are right and we make sure the ones that will need some support have it in place. We have currently emptied down to around 47 hedgehogs, 10 birds of prey and a few other birds at this point, but this year in particular has been more confusing for nature.  Even now, towards the end of December, we are getting tiny baby hedgehogs arriving.

Whatever happens we know that next year is going to be a busy one.  In addition to the demands on us to take more and more animals, we have to secure the future of the rescue in terms of premises.  Whatever the year brings, we have lots of plans in place for a bright future, doing what we love, working together for nature.

If you would like to support our work, find out more here.