News

22/08/22

Hi all!

Today's newsletter is probably the most exciting I've written so far...we have HEDGEHOGS ON CAMPUS!

Hedgehog July 2022 Survey Findings Map.png

At the end of July/start of August, we had teams from across the campus diligently monitoring tunnels at multiple locations in all sorts of weather (and, after badger visits, all sorts of states!) to survey for mammals in our city. As you can see from my expertly constructed map, we found a wonderful level of diversity, from tiny mice to several badger visits, possible fox and rabbit evidence and even hedgehogs in Weston Park!

The next steps from this will be to establish feeding stations for hedgehogs, and continue our surveying efforts in new and already surveyed areas to monitor our population. Our landscaping teams are already working hard to make the campus suitable for hedgehogs, so I'm hopeful we will continue to see signs of these amazing little mammals on campus.

We really couldn't have done this without our amazing team of surveyors, and something that will help HFC in future is more volunteers taking on tasks to help us achieve and maintain our gold award - please click here to see our Google doc of our activities and comment/email me if you want to take on any of these tasks! We have some upcoming events you can join in with too, please see the section below.

As well as this, I'm looking for people to help me with running HFC here at Sheffield. Any help is super appreciated, but I'm particularly looking for people to help us with:

Running social media accounts

Maintaining our website

Writing our newsletter

Organising litter picks

Helping run surveys (delivering/collecting/preparing equipment and tunnels)

Compiling data (checking survey sheets are filled in, gathering pictures in drive folders, etc)

Please let me know if you'd like to help with any of these - they're only small tasks but help us reach more staff/students as well as giving me more time to work on larger scale HFC goals!

Upcoming Hedgehog Friendly Campus Events

Get in touch if you'd like to help with either of these!

Saturday 17th September: Sheffield Waterfront Festival

Public outreach event to talk about our HFC work at Sheffield and what the public can do to help hedgehogs. See the news section on our website for examples of previous outreach events.

Friday 23rd September: Tunnel Workshop and Survey at Endcliffe

As part of intro/freshers we are holding a 5 day survey at the student residences and will show the students how to make and monitor the tunnels, as well as providing support for students in the 5 survey days following.

Thank you everyone, as always please give me a shout to chat anything hoggy!

Have a great week!

Map of diversity across campus and hedgehog prints

Messy badgers!

15/07/22

Hello hedgehog friendly campus team!

I just wanted to update everyone on our successes at The Walkley Festival and some exciting upcoming hedgehog survey events across campus and in the community.

The Walkley Festival

We had stalls on 25th June at the Walkley Ebenezer, 26th June at the Morley Street Allotments and 10th July at Ruskin Park for the festival finale. The stalls were a great success, and we were busy for hours chatting to members of the public about our work at the university as well as how people can help hedgehogs in their own gardens and allotments. See attached pics!

For those of you who like number crunching, we gave out over 60 leaflets and activity sheets, over 30 lists of useful hedgehog websites, and raised almost £20 for British Hedgehog Preservation Society (not bad when barely anyone carries cash anymore!)

We will definitely get involved again next year, so don't worry if you couldn't help out this time around.

Hedgehog Surveys

Last week I sent an email out that Natalie put together about our surveys across campus in a few weeks time. Loads of people are already interested from across the university! If you're interested, please drop me an email. I'll be emailing out about this today, I'm hoping to start the surveys on w/c 25th July.

Probably the most exciting outcome from the Walkley Festival was many members of the public being interested in running a survey on their allotments, which will help us complete an action to survey in the community for our Gold Award. I'm hoping to organise this for later in the Summer, so I'll be in touch when I have some dates and plans!

In addition to this, we will be holding our final round of campus surveys at the student residences as part of Fresher's Week, with the workshop being held on Friday 23rd September. Again, I'll be in touch closer to the time about opportunities to help out with this.

06/07/22

Good morning everyone,

We have some exciting hog opportunities coming up! Please let me know if you'd like any more info and to be involved :) I may be a little slow to reply as I am on annual leave until 13th July but I will keep an eye on my emails for hoggy things!

Sunday 10th July 11am - 4pm: HFC Sheffield Stall at Ruskin park to close the Walkley Festival. Involves handing out leaflets and chatting to the public about  our HFC efforts at Sheffield and what they can do to help hedgehogs too!

w/c 25th July: Hedgehog footprint tunnel surveys across campus! Please see below info sent out to Green Impact teams, kindly put together by Natalie!

Hedgehog survey season is upon us! 

Interested in contributing to our understanding of where these spiny creatures are active around the University? 

The University's Hedgehog Friendly Campus team will be running a hedgehog survey for staff to get involved with, during the w/c 25th July. 

Participate in this survey by looking after a hedgehog tunnel for a week! The University has 10 hedgehog tunnels to distribute across departments - will your department foster one?

This will not be a time-consuming commitment - you'll be able to attend a brief online workshop explaining how the survey will work, and then once you've chosen where you want your tunnel to be located, it's simply a case of taking a peek into the tunnel every day for 5 days, to see if there has been any sign of hedgehogs! 

If you're interested in helping out with this survey as an individual or with colleagues in your Green Impact team or beyond, please get in touch with Gracie Adams at g.adams@sheffield.ac.uk. 

16/05/22

Hi everyone! I hope you're all well and have been enjoying the nice weather.

I just wanted to let you all know about some upcoming HFC events and how we've been getting on. Sorry it's a long one, we've been busy!

1. Summer Hedgehog Survey on Campus: I would love to organise a survey across campus for staff (and any students who are still around of course!) to take part in. Please fill in this short google form to give me an idea of when/where we could do it!

2. Walkley Festival is a series of events held over a few weeks at various locations in Walkley and we have stalls/talks on a few of the days. Please let me know if you'd like to assist on any of these events!

Saturday 25th June 10am - 2pm: HFC Sheffield Stall at the Walkley Ebenezer to inform the local community about our HFC efforts at Sheffield and what they can do to help hedgehogs. I'm hoping to get people to 'sign up' to do a hedgehog survey so we can tick off another Gold Action - UN053 to survey in the community!

Sunday 26th June time TBC: Bug hotel workshop and talk about HFC at Sheffield at Morely street allotments.

Sunday 10th July 11am - 4pm: HFC Sheffield Stall at Ruskin park to close the Walkley Festival. Will be similar to the stall on Sat 25th June.

3. Fresher's Week Hedgehog Survey: Greg is hoping to organise for us to run two workshops a year at the residences to get lots of students involved with our efforts. The next one is Friday 23rd September 6 - 8pm and we have already pencilled one in for Hedgehog Awareness Week next year too! I'll remind you guys about that closer to the time :)

Also just a reminder to also take a look at our google doc of our progress towards our gold award. If you see anything you'd like to work on or be involved with, please comment on the doc and let me know :D

Finally, our Hedgehog Awareness Week celebrations were a success and Bronte, Jenna, Natalie and I had a lovely litter pick - we almost filled a black bin bag, but were pleasantly surprised that there was less litter around Weston Park than during previous picks, which is positive!

Bronte, Jenna and I then hosted a hedgehog tunnel workshop at Endcliffe on Friday night and we had a really great turn out of students who have also signed up to be part of HFC! We used 3 tunnels to survey over 5 nights and found plenty of small mammal tracks as well as some cat tracks, though unfortunately no hogs this time. Most activity was found near the pond!