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The British Hedgehog Preservation Society is based in the Midlands in Ludlow. When I talked to the woman in charge, Fay Vass, she said hedgehogs face a huge number of problems but there is action we can all take to help.

At the moment the society is running a campaign to encourage postal workers not to drop their red rubber bands since these are just one of the many pieces of litter that hedgehogs can get tangled up in.

And of course at this time of year if you are planning a bonfire for November the 5th you want to check it for hibernating hedgehogs. Or even better store the wood in a pile and move it to the bonfire location on the day you intend to light it.

But longer term we can all take action to make our gardens in particular more hedgehog friendly. Hedgehogs have a surprisingly large territory and will often travel up to a mile every night looking for food.

As we make our gardens more secure though we make it harder for hedgehogs to roam. So with the aid of funding from the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Wildlife Fund there's now a website that is full of advice on how a few small changes in our gardens can improve things. Click to find out more and request a free pack to get you started.

And since hedgehogs love eating slugs just a few small changes in your garden could bring welcome relief to your hostas too.

You could in theory trap every single crayfish and record the numbers but that would take too long and cost far too much. So instead you have to rely on some form of sampling.

I've managed to track down a scientific paper in the public domain that discusses the various ways of doing this and the sort of population estimates and errors they generate. You can read it .

In the case of in Nuneaton the team caught a sample of native crayfish, placed identifiable marks on them and then released them.

They then returned at a later date to catch another sample. Of course some of those crayfish will have been caught and marked the first time around. And knowing that number allows you to make an estimate of the population in the pool as a whole.

This is slightly easier in this case as Ensor Pool is a closed system unlike a stream where crayfish might wander in and out of the stretch you are interested in.

There's some discussion in the paper I linked to about the problems of using the same technique to catch the crayfish. The suggestion is they might actually learn to avoid being caught if you use the same method twice and that would skew the result.

In the end the estimate of the population of Ensor Pool is between 50,000 to 100,000 native crayfish. Which is more than enough to help repopulate similar pools and help stop the native crayfish being wiped out by infected interlopers.

Finally there has been a bit of a revival of interest in eating crayfish in recent years and it's even featured as a storyline in "The Archers". But as Josh Archer discovered there are rules and regulations in place that you need to pay attention to. You need a licence for one thing and you have to be certain not to catch the rarer native crayfish only interlopers like the American signal crayfish. You can read more and apply for a licence .

So back in June last year we asked for your help. Researchers at the University of Birmingham had been studying the impact of feeding wild birds and it appeared it might be doing more harm than good.

Specifically it appeared that when garden birds were fed by people they ended up laying fewer eggs and having fewer chicks. The researchers wanted to know more about the feeding of wild birds in the Midlands and they turned to you for help.

Hundreds of you rose to the challange by filling in an online survey and the researchers have now cruched the numbers and come to some conclusions. You can read a full report from researcher Chris Nichols here. [1.4MB]

Here's some of the important points from the results;

The questionnaire was launched against the backdrop of "novel and concerning findings" from researchers at the University of Birmingham who found that providing supplementary food to Blue and Great Tits in an area of woodland in north Worcestershire actually reduced the number of eggs laid and the number of offspring that hatched, compared with an area in the same woodland where no supplementary food was provided.

Whilst these findings are counter-intuitive and surprising, don't set fire to your bird feeder just yet! You are not necessarily harming the birds you feed in your garden. Conversely, the majority of studies into the impact of supplementary feeding on the breeding success of small songbirds (including many familiar garden visitors such as Robins and Blackbirds) report either positive findings or no significant impact at all.

It turns out our viewers and listeners are a pretty nice bunch too;

The enthusiasm and detail with which questionnaires were completed are testament to the pleasure brought to those in the West Midlands engaged in feeding garden birds - we hope that this reflects the national picture. However, what are the public's motives behind feeding garden birds? Sixty-four per cent of respondents stated that they feed birds to "Benefit" them in contrast to 36% who engage in feeding to attract them to their gardens. We can take from this that the people of the West Midlands have a strong conservation ethic, and are largely motivated by the prospect of helping bird populations.

But as is sometimes the case, even after all this research the scientists want to learn more. Never the less;

Unfortunately, there are few concrete facts regarding the effects of feeding on our garden birds. So please don't stop feeding the birds in your garden if you already do so.

The hundreds of you that took part in the survey will have helped the researchers learn much more about this subject. This means as the continue to study the effects of feeding birds they can use the information you supplied to make sure they are reproducing the conditions in our gardens. The eventual aim to make sure that feeding birds provides them with the maximum benefits.