A wildlife charity seeking to protect native hedeghog populations in decline in the UK is calling for support to afford their nests legal protection.

Hedgehogs are already protected by law, but a petition calling for measures to protect their nesting sites too has received 92,000 signatures to date.

The threshold for a parliamentary debate is 100,000 signatures minimum.

Secret World Wildlife Rescue in Somerset said building housing estates was threatening hedgehog habitats.

Pauline Kidner from the charity said: “When you see the large amounts of housing estates that are going up and all these fences built with cement bases, it means that these animals, wherever they are, lose their foraging [space] and they’re unable to move from one garden to the next.”

She said foraging space and the ability to move about with freedom was “so important” for hedgehogs to be able to survive.

Hedeghog numbers have fallen by up to 50% in rural areas since 2000, according to one report, and they are registered as vulnerable to extinction on the Red List for Britain’s mammals.

The figure represents a three-fold mortality rate on 2016 data, described as “alarming” by a team at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) researchers.

A study in 2016 put the UK road death figure at 100,000 but experts suggested that was a “mid-line estimate”.

Researchers said measures such as tunnels and speed bumps “could” protect the animals but ultimately relied on drivers’ behaviour to change.

PhD student Lauren Moore led the review, which has been jointly funded by wildlife charity People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) and NTU.

Recent estimates put the hedgehog population in England, Wales and Scotland at about one million, compared with 30 million in the 1950s.

“Hedgehog roadkill is sadly a very familiar sight both in the UK and in Europe,” Ms Moore said.

The research considered a number of measures to protect the creatures, including speed bumps, road signs and tunnels, but concluded none would be effective without help from drivers.

“Although we know some hedgehogs use road-crossing structures, we don’t yet know how effective these solutions are,” Ms Moore continued.

“Changing drivers’ behaviour has been shown to be difficult to achieve and sustain, reducing the potential for meaningful reductions in roadkill.”

A woman who has filled both her and her mother’s home with rescued hedgehogs says she cannot take in any more.

Paula Garner, from Barrow upon Soar in Leicestershire, has been nursing the spiky animals back to health for the past five years.

She said she was currently caring for about 80 hedgehogs and had reached her limit.

It follows a spike in new arrivals due to the hot weather and a mystery illness affecting young hedgehogs.

Ms Garner said her rescue operation started five years ago when her mother found a maggot-infested hedgehog and no existing sanctuaries had space.

A local vet showed her how to help the animals return to full fitness and when she posted about it on Facebook, more people began bringing her sick hedgehogs to care for.

Her house is now home to dozens of recuperating hogs and hoglets, and she uses her mother’s house in a neighbouring village as a makeshift intensive care unit.

The nocturnal mammals were found at only 39% of sites surveyed.

Experts and volunteers set up tunnels baited with tinned sausages. Hedgehogs had to walk over ink pads to reach the food, leaving their prints on paper.

The method allowed researchers to identify hedgehog presence with almost complete accuracy for the first time.

The research, which was carried out by scientists from Nottingham Trent University, the University of Reading and The Mammal Society, is published in the journal Mammal Review.

Hedgehog populations in the UK are believed to be in rapid decline.

The new study builds a picture about how they are distributed in urban and rural areas. The finding that hedgehogs were only present in 39% of locations visited was “lower than anticipated”, said research team member Dr Richard Yarnell, from Nottingham Trent University’s School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences.

“Historically we thought that hedgehogs were pretty well distributed across the country,” he told BBC Nature.

He added: “What’s certainly clear now and after using this methodology is that the populations… seem to be quite local but not widely distributed across the countryside as we once suspected.

“And in the wider rural landscape they do generally seem to be absent.”