Dear All,

I still wait to hear from Kit Malthouse and the team at the Housing Ministry - but that does not mean all is quiet on the hedgehog front! For those who are able but have yet to join in the Facebook group, there are over 2000 people now sharing photos, videos and stories of their experiences with our prickly friends! it is a great place to pick up top tips for making hedgehog holes.

For fear of causing offence - and I know it does upset some of you, but I have no 'job' - I earn what I can from writing, photography and public speaking - so I will be blatant ... I write books about wildlife! If you do feel moved to get any, your local bookshop would love you to get it from there - and in fact, I would be as happy if you got it from the library too - I want people to read them!!

But to business - there is a job going for someone special - someone who can cope with me in meetings for a start! We need a new Hedgehog Officer to front the Hedgehog Street campaign - working with an amazing bunch of people at the People's Trust for Endangered Species offices in Battersea, London and co-funded by the wonderful British Hedgehog Preservation Society. Follow the link, have a read and see if you fit the bill.

The work that we do with Hedgehog Street is important - this petition has sprung from the ideas we developed nearly ten years ago surrounding the vital need for a more connected landscape. So please, read and share - we need someone good and strong to help hedgehogs - we have to work with farmers, developers, politicians and we need to keep pushing the story into the media - so let's find the perfect person.

In other news, apart from talking to the Royal Town Planning Institute at their conference in Sheffield, a local primary school, Woodstock Natural History Society and the Oxford Preservation Trust all about different aspects of hedgehog conservation, it has been a quiet week ... oh - that was forgetting my daughter Mati in her last week of GCSEs and my son Pip singing at four different events in 25 hours over the weekend!

Thank you to ATM for painting the wonderful mural - to be seen at Secret World Wildlife Rescue in Somerset.

More soon - and I will keep chasing Kit and his team - we WILL make this petition count.