My violent wife

We went for a little bushwalk today (or was it a tramp?) at Hakarimata Scenic Reserve near Ngauruwahia (details in a later post!). Mel decided to try wearing her boots that she hasn't worn for a long, long time... and within the space of the rather short walk that we did, she managed to rip the sole completely off one boot and half off the other one! These boots are about 7-8 years old now, but still, we weren't particularly impressed that the sole had completely disintegrated - they haven't had all that much use really!

Now she wants to get new ones so we can go on our family tramping trips...

24 hour hedgehog care finished

Took the hedgehog to the vet, they happily took it and I don't have to do anything more. They didn't say whether it was going to live or die, but I'm happy as it is now not my decision.

Hedgehog update...

After a call to the SPCA and some more googling here's what I've found out:

• vets will assess hedgehogs for free as they are classed as 'wildlife'
• the SPCA will not euthanase the hedgehog just because it is a 'pest'
• although hedgehogs are an introduced species and have a large impact of New Zealand's ecology there is very little in the way of a management or eradication plan (except for the gulf islands)

So after school/kindy pick up today I'm going to take it to a vet.

Ben telling his class about the hedgehog.

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The Hedgehog roadshow

The Hedgehog that we rescued yesterday is doing the rounds of school and kindy today. It spent the morning at school in Ben's class - the teacher changed the whole program of the day to 'Hedgehog day'. Then this afternoon it is at kindy with Joanna - they have a cool clear perspex observation box to put animals in (it has ventilation), so they can all have a good close up look.

Hedgehog details

When we got home from school/kindy pick up this afternoon I noticed that the bird netting over our berry garden. I went over to investigate and discovered a hedgehog with bird netting twisted around it's neck. Before I tried to free it, I got my leather garden gloves on to protect my hands from the spikes. And because of all those spikes tangled up it the netting, there was now way I was going to be able to untwist it...I needed to cut it out. So I cut the bird netting around it and then took it over to our steps where I could sit down and start the careful task of snipping through the strands of the netting that were wrapped around its' neck (that is what the white stuff is in the photos). The problem was it kept on curling itself up into a ball whenever I touched it so although it was easy to cut through all the strands at the back of the neck, it took a while and a fair bit of manual persuasion to get it out from under its' neck.

It is now sitting in a box in our lounge. We don't want to keep it as a pet and we don't particularly want to reintroduce it to the wild as it is an introduced species which has a devastating affect on the NZ ecosystem as there are no predators to keep their numbers down. So we are going to ring the SPCA tomorrow (NZ version of RSPCA) and see if they will take it and humanely euthenase it (I did google to see if we could euthenase it ourselves - seeing as we have done that with our sick chook - but they are very difficult to humanely euthenase using physical methods and we don't own any anesthetising drugs etc. to do it chemically ).

hedgehog size

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hedgehog trapped in our garden

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Going crackers

After last week's near famine in the morning tea department, I spent an hour this morning making 4 batches of snack crackers. I made a different flavour for each batch:

• poppy seed (made this flavour the first time)
• coriander seed (I think i need to crush the seeds a little first)
• cheese and onion (these turned out great - I used dried onion and a combination of some grated edam and parmesan cheese)
• lime and black pepper (a bit too peppery - I'll use a bit less than 1tbsp of whole peppercorns next time)

So there will be no shortage of crackers to have crackers and cheese or dip for at least the next couple of weeks.

i felt like i was young again...

This morning we went cruising the bushwalking gear shops (since we moved to Hamilton both a macpac and mountain designs have opened). There are 3 located in the one shopping complex (the 2 mentioned before plus a Kathmandu) and as we were moving from store to store looking at cool bushwalking gear, it brought had memories of when we used to do the valley strip of bushwalking shops before we had kids.

Unfortunately the issue we had back then, is the same now...lots of cool stuff but we don't have the money to buy most of it and we don't go walking that often to justify the expense of a lot of the cool stuff.

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