After two years of support from Heritage Lottery Fund, British Hedgehog Preservation Society & local benefactors, the Suffolk Wildlife Trust Ipswich Hedgehog Project has worked with over 6000 people to raise awareness for hedgehogs through talks, walks, school assemblies, park events and workshops. Over 400 people have helped with our footprint & camera surveys across the town and we’ve had an amazing 1045 hours contributed from dedicated volunteers. We’ve walked 459km on night transects, collectively spent 159 hours searching for hedgehogs by torchlight, have had over 700 new hedgehog sightings and over 780 gardens recorded as accessible for hedgehogs.

To celebrate all that Ipswich has achieved so far, we invited the town to a hedgehog lantern parade and were amazed by the turn out and the brilliant hedgehog lanterns created. Around 150 town residents weaved their way from Holywells park to La Tour Cycle Café, lanterns twinkling in twilight with hedgehog chatter abound!

We’ve built an amazing momentum for hedgehog conservation here in Ipswich – there have been some fantastic actions taken by individuals, community groups, businesses and land managers. But we can’t stop now – there is still more that needs to be done to secure the future of our local hedgehog populations.

You can continue to log your hedgehog sightings and hedgehog-friendly gardens on our online map, you can borrow our footprint tunnels or cameras to survey your garden, you can organize a drilling day on your street to open up walled gardens with our help & kit (email Ali for more info), you can sign up to be a hedgehog champion or support our work by becoming a Suffolk Wildlife Trust member.

Keep following this blog for updates on our Ipswich hedgehog and urban wildlife activities!