The YSJ Hedgehog Friendly Campus campaign team are aiming to submit for Silver Accreditation this year. We currently have staff from the Grounds & Sports Ground team, Energy & Environment team and our new Students’ Union President of Wellbeing and Diversity working together.

As part of the campaign, we have recently completed a hedgehog survey at our Lord Mayor’s Walk campus and Haxby Road campus with guidance from Jo Wilkinson from Hedgehog Friendly Campus.

For the survey, we put together a long triangular tunnel and slid in a long piece of carboard with paper clipped on each side. We also painted hedgehog friendly ink toward the middle to collect their footprints. There was some cat food placed in the centre to attract them in.

We placed one tunnel at the back of the Chapel in the wildflower area and two tunnels at Haxby Road Sports Park.

It was a five-night survey and we checked for signs of any hedgehog footprints every morning.

We were only finding cat prints etc. until the last day but on our last day, we found some hedgehog prints in the Lord Mayor’s Walk tunnel!

The Grounds team and some staff have spotted hedgehogs at the Lord Mayor’s Walk campus before, but it was nice to get evidence of them using our campus.

We did not find any at Haxby Road Sports Centre this time unfortunately, hopefully we will find some more next time.

There are a lot of things you can do to help the hedgehogs on our campus, take a look at the leaflet for more information. For more information on our campaign, please visit our intranet page.

We are also planning on doing more activities towards September. If you are interested, please contact us on sustainability@yorksj.ac.uk!