Sir, – In your article on 'Farmers’ guide to helping hedgehogs' (The Scottish Farmer, July 21), Hedgehog Street’s Emily Wilson acknowledged that badgers, which are predators of hedgehogs 'may also be a factor in areas where hedgehogs have fewer safe places to take refuge'.

The undisputed fact is that badgers are a threat to hedgehogs and where badgers exist, hedgehogs will have an uphill struggle to survive. This is hardly surprising when one considers that the badger population, thanks to being legally protected, has exploded from around 50,000 in 1980 to over 1m now.

Interestingly, numbers of hedgehogs more than doubled in an experiment carried out during the randomised badger cull. It is not just hedgehogs and other animals which are suffering from badger predation – ground nesting birds like curlews and lapwings also face constant predation of their eggs and fledglings from these apex predators.

It is all very well for Emily Wilson to exhort farmers to do more to help hedgehogs but most farmers are already doing their bit through the agri-environmental schemes, as well as off their own initiative. In carrying out these habitat improvements they are providing the right conditions for animals including hedgehogs and birds to thrive but in so doing, they are also providing even more ideal conditions for their predators.

Until there is a change in the law which allows badger numbers to be reduced to sustainable levels throughout the country, hedgehogs will continue to decline in the countryside, as will many iconic ground nesting birds whose eggs and young prove irresistible to badgers.

Colin Strang Steel

Trustee of SongBird Survival,

Threepwood,

Galashiels.