{"id":658989,"date":"2026-06-26T08:16:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T08:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/658989\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T08:16:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T08:16:13","slug":"dorchester-rescue-sees-surge-of-hoglets-abandoned-in-heatwave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/658989\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorchester rescue sees surge of hoglets abandoned in heatwave"},"content":{"rendered":"

The rescue centre has capacity for just over 130 hedgehogs.<\/p>\n

Willcox said if hoglets had been born there, the mothers were not disturbed until the little ones reached a couple of weeks old.<\/p>\n

“We’ve got around 20 hand feeders at the moment, which is very tiring work,” she said.<\/p>\n

On its website, the rescue writes, external<\/a> that hedgehogs breed in spring and summer, mostly during May and June, producing litter of about four or five babies.<\/p>\n

It adds the hoglets will start leaving the nest to forage with their mother at about four weeks old and will be independent by about eight weeks old.<\/p>\n

But Willcox said the heat was “a huge factor” for the mass abandonments.<\/p>\n

“This is for all wildlife, but hedgehogs in particular – if mums can’t find water or food source, they do very much have a survival of the fittest mentality, so we are seeing quite a large number of juveniles and babies coming in to us at the moment.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rescue centre has capacity for just over 130 hedgehogs. Willcox said if hoglets had been born there,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-658989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}