Well, we have only gone and done it - reach the next staging point on this long journey! 750,000 of you - 3/4 of a million - it is awe-inspiring.

Along with my wife (and the robin) we have made a short thank you video.

So is this a time to take the foot off the pedal and sit back and enjoy such a large number? Not a chance. All around the country new housing developments are being built and the pace will increase as we emerge from lockdown. We need to use the moral authority generated by this petition to work on the developers and argue for, at least, the inclusion of hedgehog highways. 

For example, in Thurston, near Bury St Edmunds, there is a lot of building going on. And one of our number wrote a very polite letter to one of the companies, Persimmon: "we have up to 5 to 6 Hedgehogs visiting our garden every night and we have 1 that is resident in a nest box. We have made our garden Hedgehog friendly by creating Hedgehog highways between our neighbours gardens by creating Hedgehog sized holes in the wooden fences so that they can travel easily between the gardens. Hedgehogs forage up to 2 miles from where they nest and an adult male Hedgehog's home range is an area of about 20 - 30 hectares or 60 acres. They need this large area to forage for food. I am most concerned that losing so much of the farmland around Thurston we will lose our population of Hedgehogs in Thurston. The only way we could mitigate this loss of farmland is to allow Hedgehogs to freely roam through the gardens on the College Park development."

But the response from Persimmon made me realise how much work we still have to do, they said that the area was, "considered not to be an important habitat for hedgehogs and that any mitigation for them was not required."

Until this culture of contempt for wildlife is changed, we cannot afford to stop. I would like to applaud the resident of Thurston for pursuing the matter further - again politely, arguing with each point made by the developer. And I think we should ALL do the same. Every time a new development is being considered - get in touch with the planning department at your council - and write to the developer too. Some are sensitive - Bovis has already come out as a hedgehog friends! Others - and it would seem Persimmon fall into this - seem to care not one bit for the nature on which we all rely.

Back to the main story ... just wanted to say thank you again. I am sorry that I do not respond to all the comments beneath these updates - it is a very clunky system and because of that I set up the Hedgehog Highways Facebook group. Now, I know many of you are not on Facebook and I apologise - but it is the easiest way to share our ideas. 

Stay safe, and stay alert ... to the plans of developers in your area ... and write letters!!