By Sarah LaBrasca | Project Leader
Conservationists consider that there were around 36 million hedgehogs in the UK in the 1950s but they are now in sharp decline with less than a million in the country. In London, hedgehogs used to be found in the Royal Parks - St James’s, Green, and Hyde Parks, and Kensington Gardens - until the 1970s, and there still remain a very small and endangered population in a small area of Regent’s Park. This is where we based our project to save the Royal Hedgehogs, enabling them to be tracked and studied.
Our volunteer technologists have been developing a new state of the art bio-tracker that will supply real-time information on animal behaviour, including during night activity, which would be applicable to many similar projects worldwide.
As our previous reports have stated, the hedgehog population in Regent’s Park is severely compromised by the creation of a lorry-holding site for HS2 on their territory. In spite of numerous protests, this impediment now appears to be unavoidable.
David Field, Zoological Director of the Zoological Society of London, said: “It may seem strange that we’re seeking protection for a car park, but this is an example of the increasingly desperate reality for urban wildlife. Forced by human pressures to find sanctuary in the unlikeliest of places, it is our duty to protect the remaining refuges of these creatures.
“While HS2 have admitted that their proposed use of the car park as a lorry-holding site will pose a risk to the hedgehogs, they have not accepted our advice that no mitigation measures will be enough to protect them from that risk.
“With the hedgehog surveys still in their infant stages, we’ve only just begun to learn more about these creatures living in the Park, and we need more surveys, more information and more time to understand how we can best protect them. We can’t do this if the car park becomes a 24/7 hub for construction.”
You can read the full ZSL article in the attached link.
We are pleased that our project has delivered innovative concept designs for new tracking devices. We now need another partner with whom we can continue the work on the ground. For the moment our designs are available for any group that wishes to consider similar solutions.
Our Save the Royal Hedgehogs project has meantime been withdrawn and will no longer be running on GlobalGiving. We would like to sincerely thank everyone for their help and generous support for this project which has enabled it to come to this point, and assure them that Smart Earth Network continues the work already done towards the development of these new technologies to help conserve our wildlife and biodiversity in general.
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