by Hugh Warwick
This skirt is something that taxidermists seem to fail to understand with depressing regularity. When presented with a spiny corpse, they simply stuff it, giving no thought to the hedgehog’s skirt, so the stuffed hedgehog ends up looking like a prickly football. Just because the skin is there does not mean it needs stuffing.
In some hedgehogs the skin does get well and truly stuffed. In the news recently there was a hedgehog found that weighed in at a massive 2.2 kilos (it had apparently been eating the bread left out for the birds and looked as if its legs were not going to be able to reach the ground). Usually our hedgehogs range in size from 450 grams up to around 1.2 kilos. They tend to be about 20–30 centimetres long.
The skirt of skin – which provides the excess to envelop the balled-up hog – hides four legs of surprising length, up to 10 centimetres from hip to toe. The usual image of the hedgehog is of the clockwork toy – or one of the people from Trumpton, rolling about on invisible wheels. But there are four legs busy at work. I suppose a hedgehog is a little like a swan – serenely floating across a lake, but with webbed feet working hard below the surface. It is only when the hedgehog wants to move with speed that it hoicks up its skirt of skin, revealing the elegant legs, and off it goes.
Or up it goes. They can climb with some agility, if no great sense. I met a man who described watching a hedgehog in his garden determinedly walking in a straight line. When confronted by the wire container of grass cuttings, rather than take the very short detour around, it began to climb the vertical structure. On reaching the top, over a metre up, it toppled into the clippings, padded its way across to the other side, clambered up again before tumbling to the ground and continuing on its way, unflustered by the experience. While that reveals great things about hedgehogs’ ability to climb, it does not say much for their intelligence.
The climbing gets them into some rather unlikely corners. I received a letter from Elizabeth Hibbert in Walthamstow, Greater London, indicating a hedgehog’s great determination to scale the heights. She was disturbed in the dead of night, in her first-floor bedroom, by an animal. At first she thought it a large rat, but then found it to be a hedgehog, which promptly scurried away under a large wardrobe. Where it stayed for several days, until a man from a wildlife rescue centre came and helped extricate the animal. Whether this rescuer should be allowed out in public, though, is another matter: he claimed to have seen a hedgehog running across the North Circular Road at night, standing on its hind legs.
One of the reasons why hedgehogs are so adept at climbing is that they possess highly effective shock absorbers: their spines. Where the prickle emerges from the skin it is a little thinner and slightly angled. This bends and cushions the fall of a careless hedgehog and also has the advantage of preventing the spines from being driven back into its body.
Their ability to survive a tumble does not make them careless of gravity, though, which is fortunate, as gravity presents the best way of unrolling a reluctant hedgehog. Unrolling a hedgehog is not gratuitous; it is the only way of telling boys from girls.
First, pick up your hedgehog. I tend to use lightweight gardening gloves, but if you are careful and blessed with rhino skin, you can get away without. I am assuming the hedgehog will be in a ball – they usually are (you would be too if a monster was to tower some 20 metres above your head). Go gently: always gently, these are precious creatures to be treated with great respect.
So, to unroll, place the bundle of spines in both hands. Have a close look and see where the nose meets the tail; have the nose side of the ball on one hand and the tail on the other. Gently raise one hand and then the other, rocking the animal by only a couple of centimetres. Gradually start to shift the hands apart and, usually, the hedgehog prefers to unravel rather than tumble.
Now, if you just want to take a peek and check the sex, lift the front up. If it has a penis it is male. The penis is the bit that looks rather like a tummy button, about 3–5 centimetres in front of the tail. So as long as you can get them to unroll, that should be straightforward. Apart from when they are quite young, as then the unrolling is much harder. Sometimes the umbilical cord can cause confusion too in new-born animals.
But if you are lucky enough to have a reasonably compliant hog in your hands, why not have a closer look at the amazing body? It might let you stroke its tummy – some do – though be aware that the balling mechanism is fast and can leave you wearing a pretty painful glove, fingers trapped inside.
While you are there, check out the legs. They are as long as they are because they have more to deal with than just locomotion. They allow the hedgehog to groom. I have had people tell me that the reason hedgehogs are notoriously riddled with fleas is that the spines prevent them from grooming properly, but a hedgehog can reach around with its rear feet, feet that support considerable claws, and have a good scratch.
Most hedgehogs have five toes on their feet, apart from the four-toed hedgehog, that is, which has – well, I am sure you don’t need help – four toes, but only on its rear feet. And we must not forget the tail – there is nearly 2 centimetres of tail.
With all those spines, you have to ask yourself, why are hedgehogs nocturnal? Why go to all that bother to protect yourself if you are just going to hide away in the shadows? Well, for mammals, our behaviour is the odd one – being diurnal is peculiar. And as for the hedgehog, it is simple: while the spines lend protection, they are not perfect, and, most importantly, hedgehog food is nocturnal. All those mini-beasts prefer the damper, cooler nights, away from the birds and the desiccating sun.
It is easy to look at hedgehogs on their nightly patrols, stumbling through the undergrowth, and think that they have poor eyesight. Well, as one writer has pointed out, if we had our noses just a few centimetres off the ground among the mud and grass, we would not be able to see much. In fact, hedgehogs’ eyes are pretty sharp and they may have some limited colour vision. But the main cues they rely on are sound and smell.
Just listening to a hedgehog in the undergrowth makes it clear how important smell is – all that snuffling is not an indication of a cold and neither is their perpetually wet nose. The moisture assists the uptake of scent. As for sound, well, hedgehogs have quite selective hearing – like my children, I suspect. They are much better at hearing high-frequency noises – if you jangle keys near a hedgehog you will get a very swift response. They cannot rely on sound too much, though, given the racket they can make when moving through the undergrowth.
I received a letter from Julian Greenwood, who, when a young army officer out on exercises with his unit one night, discovered just how much noise they can make. While planning an attack he heard a sound which he took to be an enemy patrol. Swiftly he established an ambush, but even with night-vision equipment they were unable to spot the intruder, who was getting closer. Really admiring the camouflage, they readied weapons, issued a challenge and then Julian started laughing as the inquisitive hedgehog meandered through his legs.
While it is dangerous to generalize, these basic physiological traits are probably fairly consistent across the range of hedgehogs. We must remember that we are not the only people with hedgehogs in the world. There are twenty different species, though I feel I should take some issue with the point at which a hedgehog becomes a hedgehog. Surely spines should be a defining feature. Starting with the spiny ones, the most authoritative list of hedgehog species was set out by fellow hedgehog expert Nigel Reeve. He lists them as:
Erinaceus europaeus (‘our’ hedgehog)
Erinaceus concolor (eastern European hedgehog)
Erinaceus amurensis (Russia, China, Korea)
Paraechinus aethiopicus (Ethiopian hedgehog, found from Morocco to Arabian peninsula – it has long ears)
Paraechinus hypomelas (Brandt’s or long-spined hedgehog – from Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan)
Paraechinus micropus (pale or Indian hedgehog)
Atelerix albiventris (central African or white-bellied hedgehog)
Ateler
ix algirus (Algerian hedgehog – also found in coastal regions of southern France)
Atelerix frontalis (southern African hedgehog)
Atelerix sclateri (Somalian hedgehog – which may be related to white-bellied)
Hemiechinus auritus (long-eared hedgehog – found from Ukraine to China, with subspecies along the way)
Hemiechinus collaris (Hardwicke’s or collared hedgehog – eastern Pakistan and north-western India)
Hemiechinus dauricus (China)
Hemiechinus hughi (China)
Others disagree and have found another couple of species, and then there is the business of hairy hedgehogs. This might come as a shock – and a disagreeable one at that – but there are some hedgehogs that do not have spines. When is a hedgehog not a hedgehog? When it is a gymnure or moonrat, found in high forests of South-East Asia. While lacking the defensive attributes of spines, these hairy hedgehogs do have pronounced anal glands, and the greater moonrat is reckoned to smell of garlic, sweat and rotten onions. Nice.
In the UK we are at the western edge of the hedgehog’s range. They stretch all the way across to China and down to South Africa. They are found in deserts and woodland, but not up mountains or deep in bogs.
They used to live in America, in the wild. But that was a long, long time ago. I was in touch with a palaeontologist, Tom Rich, who wrote his PhD thesis on these prehistoric hogs. Studying fossils from an extinct genus of hedgehog, Brachyerix, that roamed the earth between 5 and 20 million years ago, in the Miocene, he was able to show that while hedgehogs have not undergone the sort of dramatic evolutionary change of, say, horses and whales, they are not unchanged from the earlier models. I love the idea that Miocene literally translates as ‘less recent’. Over 20 million years ago certainly strikes me as less recent. But then that is putting a very human perspective on it all. The planet has been here for over 4,000 million years, so, relatively speaking, the Miocene is not that far off at all.
But far enough to save us from confronting one of the Miocene hedgehogs, Deinogalerix, which translates as ‘terrible shrew’ (Shakespeare would have had fun taming this one). This animal, remains of which were found in modern-day Italy, was over three times the size of our hedgehog and, while lacking spines, did have some rather disturbing teeth.
Anyway, there are no hedgehogs living in the wild in the Americas, unless some of the pet pygmy hedgehogs, introduced from Africa, have escaped and set up camp.
With the sort of arrogance that comes from a colonial past, some have named the African hedgehogs pygmy hedgehogs. Yes, the species from Africa are all smaller than the European ones; in fact, all the species of hedgehog are smaller than the European ones, so perhaps it would be fairer to call the European hedgehogs ‘giant’, as opposed to labelling all the others ‘pygmy’.
Labelling hedgehogs is a fun thing to do – and I have been searching for different names the hedgehog has been given, over the years and around the world. But where did ‘hedgehog’ come from? Was it because of their habit of hogging hedges? I have heard from people who declare that the ‘hog’ is because they taste like pig, or that it is the distinctive snuffling that generated the name. Then one day I saw a photograph of a spineless specimen – not a quivering wimp of a hog, but one with no prickles. And in that shape I could see a wild boar. A very small wild boar, but there all the same.
The following is more a sample than a complete list, but it gives a flavour of the common themes:
Whatever they are called, they are frequently labelled as fleabags. That is another on the list of regular questions – why have hedgehogs got so many fleas? And then there is also the accusation that the hedgehog has infested a dog.
But hedgehog fleas are more sensible than people give them credit for, being very particular. They are species-specific. Archaeopsylla erinacei, as its name suggests, is a hedgehog flea. It has evolved to survive in an extraordinary environment. Imagine life on the back of a rabbit, for example. The dense fur requires a special set of skills to navigate. Consider the back of a hedgehog, how sparse and alien that would seem to a flea used to more claustrophobic surroundings. And likewise dogs and cats just fail to provide a suitable habitat for Archaeopsylla erinacei.
How many fleas? Well, no more than any other animal of comparable size – an average of around 100 fleas per hog. But I have come across many with none and there are hedgehog carers who have reported over 1,000 fleas on a poor individual.
So why are they considered fleabags? Well, I have talked with many people about this and have come up with four suggestions:
1. The most obvious hedgehogs are the ones out in the day and these are usually sickly. Sickly hedgehogs are less able to look after themselves and so are more likely to be infested with fleas.
2. The next most frequently observed hedgehogs are dead. If it is a recent casualty, the stranded fleas will be seeking a new host and will spring towards any warm-blooded passer-by, however unsuitable the pelage.
3. Spines are sparser than the fur of a rabbit, therefore any beasties living on the skin will be more obvious.
4. The first reaction of most hedgehogs to an approach from a human is to bristle. The spines erect as a defence, and in so doing the dark and light bands move against each other, creating what hedgehog expert Nigel Reeve so eloquently described as ‘an impression of a seething infestation’.
There are other misconceptions surrounding the flea, principally that they have a symbiotic relationship with hedgehogs – that is, the hedgehogs need them as much as they need the hedgehogs. The flourishing, and flealess, hedgehog population of New Zealand argues well against this idea.
Most of what I know about hedgehogs has, in some way, been filtered through to me from Dr Pat Morris. Now retired, though even busier than before, Pat has written more about hedgehogs than anyone else in the world. The New Hedgehog Book – an updated version of his original – is a brilliant introduction to the hedgehog basics and there has hardly been a work published on hedgehogs that does not draw heavily on his groundbreaking publications. It’s easy not to be scrupulous in acknowledging sources, so I thought I’d do it upfront.
So there you have it, all the basic facts about hedgehogs. What’s the rest of this book about, you may quite reasonably ask. Well, one part of it is to do with Hemiechinus hughi, a species I first read about fifteen years ago – though it took until now for the penny to drop that this hedgehog might possibly be called, as in fact it is, Hugh’s hedgehog. Sometimes I really do wonder how I have managed to get as far as I have if I fail to spot the bleeding obvious.
And so from hedgehog facts to hedgehog love – because from here on in the book is about my, and many other people’s, love affair with this remarkable animal. It is rare that an affair, begun as a teenager, lasts a lifetime, but I have been very lucky. Love affairs do not spring out of nowhere, there has to be a seduction, and my experience was no different.
CHAPTER
TWO
What
Do
Hedgehogs
Do?
Love did not blossom immediately. I suppose in the beginning we had more of a friendship and a working relationship. But I want to jump forward to the juicy bits.
The change came as I trudged the night fantastic through the Devon countryside on my first radio-tracking study. Perhaps it was the long period of isolation. Perhaps it was the chance to get to know hedgehogs individually. Whatever the reason, I ended up on my hands and knees, nose to nose with my new love. I like to think that my time with hedgehogs has brought me down to earth. Nocturnal adventures in hedgerows and ditches, searching for, to begin with, my subjects and later my friends, have left me damp, muddy and happy (most of the time).
Previous work had required me to rely on luck to find my hedgehogs, but this time they were all tagged and I was meeting each of them three or four times a night, getting to appreciate their very individual characters. Now, that might strike you as odd. I appreciate that some animals just don’t do ‘
character’ very much. After you have seen one bank vole, field vole, field mouse or harvest mouse, you have pretty much seen them all. I have met quite a few of these rodents in my time, usually rather indignant ones in live traps, but all the same, even on close inspection and, when I had been out on my own too long with too little sleep, after the odd conversation, really, there’s very little sign of depth of character.
But if you do get the chance, you will find, as I have done, that there is more to a hedgehog than a snuffling bundle of spines. After all, you cannot deny that dogs and cats have individual characters, so why should it be hard to imagine the same for hedgehogs?
A big part of the problem, I believe, is point of view. It is easy to get nose to nose with dogs, but nose to nose with a hedgehog takes a little more trouble. Still, when you take that trouble you find something extraordinary.
The delight is that very swiftly differences in hedgehog character emerge. Some are bold; others are shy. Some are friendly; others are quite grumpy. Some will swiftly learn you are no threat and just run; others will always retreat into a ball. Some friendly hedgehogs have bad nights – there is no guarantee. In fact, one of the complications of hedgehog research is the difficulty in reaching broad generalizations about the beast.
Nevertheless, that is what I was trying to do, back in 1993, having been recruited to a damp and muddy caravan listing slightly at the top of a Devon field by hedgehog guru Pat Morris. This was the concluding chapter of a long piece of research he had been running, considering the slightly awkward question of whether there was any point in people looking after hedgehogs.
The question is awkward because there are a lot of people who obviously get a great deal of pleasure from looking after sick and injured hogs, restoring them to health and then releasing the renovated bundles back into the wild. But until Pat started his work, no one had looked at how well the refurbished hogs survived.