The Hedgehog's Dilemma

by Hugh Warwick

  The farm I was based on was set on the side of a luxuriant valley. When I first arrived, I decided to ‘beat the bounds’ and went walking around the perimeter. Up the steep hill south of the farm, I found a badger latrine and, just like in the field guides, there was a snag of badger hair caught on a nearby piece of barbed wire. Minutes later I disturbed a hare and then a buzzard appeared overhead. At first I thought it must be a seagull – the noise felt out of place in the rolling valleys.

  Arcadia . . . almost. This otherwise idyllic landscape had a rather substantial blot: enormous 400-kilovolt-carrying pylons striding through the valley like the frozen skeletons of giant robots. And there was a son et lumière in full swing as I reluctantly plodded on towards 298 in the dark, damp night.

  The air buzzed and crackled with electricity. This was the closest I had ever been to such pylons and I was totally unprepared for the way they acted when the air was wet. Starting with an electrical hum, the cables rapidly moved on to a cacophony of crackling as the air got wetter, until they eventually began to glow. As they did now.

  All this might have been OK if the pylons carrying the cables had not slouched in their duty and held them more loftily. But the steep valley forced the crackling, glowing cables and the hedgehog tracker rather closer together than at least one party cared for.

  So early in the project and I was already talking to myself: muttering abuse at the absconding hedgehog, thinking of a name that was even remotely polite for her and trying to calm myself. The noise and proximity of the cables were bad enough, but what really set me gibbering was the aerial I was carrying. I must have slept through the lesson in physics where they explained the dos and don’ts of high-voltage electricity play. It seemed logical that any self-respecting chunk of electricity would home in on the attractive metal rod I held above my head and fry me.

  By the time I found 298, I had calmed down enough to think of something suitable to mark her exploratory prowess. Dame Freya Stark, the ‘passionate nomad’, seemed like the sort of person to associate with this determinedly mobile hog.

  I did what I needed to, separating the great lady from her worm, weighed her, double-checked that 298 really was a female, then let her return to the business of tormenting me. True to form, two nights later she went missing again, in the opposite direction.

  Males are supposed to travel further and faster than females, but as with all things hedgehog, it can be hard to generalize, and, by the end of this project, it was the females who had undertaken the longest journeys. Researchers have shown that, on average, male hedgehogs will travel 2–3 kilometres a night. Some will travel only a few hundred metres and may stay within that range for their entire lives; others have been recorded to move up to 4 kilometres in a single night. Females, just not my females, have been reported to average slightly over half this distance.

  It all depends on when you do the study, though. In the spring, male hedgehogs are up and out, looking for a mate, and travel widely. In the autumn, it is the females who tend to be the most active, as they make up for the time lost rearing young, feeding and fattening for hibernation.

  I eventually tracked Freya to the far end of the valley, over a kilometre from where she was released and two from where she was torturing me with pylon anxiety. These are just the distances on the map and mean nothing to a hedgehog, which is rarely able to walk anywhere in a straight line; there are always distractions for a busy nose.

  This time she had ended up in the barn of a farm and I was given my first opportunity to have the ‘Excuse me, but one of my hedgehogs is missing . . .’ conversation. The farmer was genuinely interested, which was just as well, because Freya hung around for a week before returning closer to the release site.

  Fortunately not all the hedgehogs behaved like this. Hettie remained near the farm where she was released, at least early on, frequently foraging in the garden. Nigel exhibited very different habits. He travelled much further than any of the other animals, but regularly returned to the same day nest, spending only the odd ‘night’ at different sites. Hettie, by comparison, spent no more than five at each nest she had built. How much this represents a difference between sexes or just between individuals is hard to tell.

  Over the weeks, they all became far more relaxed about being handled. This gave me wonderful opportunities to look at them closely. But with their new-found confidence, they no longer curled into compliant balls of spines when I needed to pick them up for weighing. Instead, they would run away whenever they got the chance.

  When a hedgehog decides to run it undergoes a transformation almost as fundamental as the ball-rolling escape. The loose ‘skirt’ is hitched up, like a car altering its suspension; the body is lifted off the ground and away it goes. Top speed has been reported as 9 km/h, but, as with the cheetah, these extraordinary bursts are only maintained for a short while. Then the skirt lowers and they return to the clockwork gait (the hedgehog, not the cheetah. I met a couple of tame cheetahs in Namibia. The youngster was rather haughty and the adult a bit of a lapdog. Neither of them was as fascinating as the wonderful hedgehog.)

  So did they run from me because they recognized my smell? Had my repeatedly benign interventions in their lives made them less fearful of humans? Perhaps I was beginning to smell like one of them? Certainly my wax coat must have had a pretty hoggy aroma.

  With them beetling off at top speed in the dark, it was a good job I had the additional assistance of the luminous tags. Radio-tracking is good at getting you to the area the hedgehog is in, but the fine-tuning is not perfect and the last few metres can be tortuous. You can’t buy the tags any more. Something about them being radioactive – well, I didn’t know that then. Perhaps too many hedgehogs in one place would create a critical mass? Or maybe terrorists would round them up to create a dirty bomb with biological shrapnel?

  The tags were clearly visible, when the nights were very dark, from more than 50 metres. But there were hazards too. When the moon was bright, moondrops, glistening on dew-laden grass or reflected in puddles, became dead ringers for hedgehogs and sent me chasing spectres.

  The moon was a great companion. Not a friend you could rely on, but one who was a great comfort when she arrived. And there was little to compare with the delight of walking the fields trailing a moon shadow.

  At the end of the project, Jean, who lived in the farmhouse, asked if I could leave the luminous tags on the hedgehogs because she was often kept awake at night by her knees. ‘So I just take myself down to the kitchen, make a cup of tea and read,’ she explained. ‘Only now I am not even bothering to switch the light on – I just watch the show as the little green lights busy themselves around the garden.’

  I would have loved to agree to her request, but at over £100 per transmitter, that was rather a lot to ask for.

  Lights darting into the undergrowth were fun, but there was better on the way. On the lawn, where the grass was short enough for me to see from a distance, I sometimes observed an amazing dance of two sprites, one circling the other, with periodic leaps and sneezes like waltzing glow-worms with hay fever. This meant I was going to find two hedgehogs at once. I did feel a bit of a killjoy, though, as it seemed being dunked into the pillowcase did rather affect the ardour of these courting hedgehogs.

  But the passion was not dampened too much, thank goodness, and my friends seemed quite able to recommence an active life later in the evening. On one night, I found Nigel with three different females in the space of four hours, and the following night, Hettie was found with two different males within an hour. All this promiscuity reassured me that my charges were becoming integrated into wild hedgehog society, as frequently the interactions included a wild hedgehog – one that was already resident on the farm.

  Early on I met some of the other residents. But this time not hedgehogs. One particularly cold, clear and beautiful night, before I was able to find some non-leaking wellies and was resorting to shopping bags as a third pair of socks, I froze at what seemed, on
this particularly silent night, like a ferocious commotion in the nearby hedge.

  Before I could plan my retreat from whatever monsters were at work, out popped a black and russet badger (the soil gives everything in the area, including most of the content of my caravan, a ruddle tinge). After snorting back and forth a few metres from me, it disappeared, only to reappear moments later, tumbling down the slope, rolling, grunting and snarling with another. The two fought in and out of the hedge, up and down the slope, for ten minutes before charging off up the hill. They had been so set on their game that they failed to notice the audience. Or perhaps the audience was beginning to smell so game that he blended into the landscape.

  It was magical and only when I tried to move again did I realize how effective mind over matter can be. My feet had become so fed up with conditions that they had shut off communication with the rest of my body and gone on strike. By the time I made it back up the other side of the valley I was shivering uncontrollably and went to sleep still in my thermal underwear, in two sleeping bags and wearing a woolly hat.

  Normally it rained.

  Sometimes it was little more than heavy fog, droplets of water only just heavy enough to fall, and so small they penetrated every possible corner. My beard was a sponge, needing to be wrung. Other times it was real rain, descending torrents like the powerful chords in the finale of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony.

  Dragging myself back out to work after a cup of tea was hard enough given the wet, but there was something deeply counterintuitive about getting active as ‘Sailing By’ drifts from the radio. However, it almost always seemed worthwhile, a bit like jumping into a river; you might hang around on the edge for ages, but you don’t regret jumping.

  Jumping into a sensual feast. After the cold, damp and dark, skies and spirits begin to lighten. There was a sense of spring loitering. Blossom and new leaves, brave bumblebees and the conversations of birds getting louder and more confident.

  During the day, the hedge banks were lit with dog violets, early purple orchids, garlic mustard, stitchwort and dandelions. By night, the moon reflected from these plants, highlighting the track. And as the weeks passed, the pastel shades of primroses gave way to the egg-yolk yellow of dandelions. The scent of spring; now that would be worth bottling.

  Out at night I would move through a wash of wild garlic down the lane, up into the wood where a wall of bluebells waited, out of the woods on to the drier slopes to be greeted with waves of coconut from the thickets of gorse. Might leave the dog fox out of the bottle though.

  Every hour or so I was reminded that I was in the present day by the noise of a car travelling along the small lane that ran by the farm. Searchlights would scour the bottoms of clouds as the cars pulled up a steep hill. However, even these occasional and slow-moving cars proved their might in the face of the most dogged hedgehog defence.

  Cars killed two of my hogs. Jimmy was the first and then Billy. Billy was great; he seemed to really relish being handled, while still acting like a normal hedgehog out in the field. He would snuffle around my already filthy clothing, trying to get up sleeves and into pockets. I should have thanked him for that; I am sure this coating of eau d’hérrison aided my acceptance by his compatriots.

  There is no teaching some of them, though, and it was not long after the death of Billy that I had one of a series of moments of high anxiety. The disadvantages of becoming too fond of your study animal dawned on me.

  Hettie vanished. I had caught up with her earlier in the evening over the hill to the north of the farm. This was unusual territory for her; she had been consistently around the central area for the past six weeks. When I went back to get a final fix on her, there was not a dicky bird, just the white noise of static from the radio receiver.

  If she had continued in a straight line from where I last saw her, the destination was depressingly clear. From the crest of the hill you looked down on the nearest busy road. Still no signal as I approached the road – a good sign, as the transmitter at least should survive a squashing. Up to the crest of the hill to the east and again, nothing. That was an early lesson in the art of radio-tracking: elevation, elevation, elevation. Getting the aerial a little higher could make all the difference to the beeps on my machine.

  So I headed west, deeply concerned that at any moment I was going to come across the flattened corpse of the sweet-natured hedgehog.

  Traffic was beginning to increase heading east to Taunton and beyond. Though I noticed the cars were behaving oddly. As they got closer to me they slowed, then pulled out into the middle of the road, accelerating away. What was it about me that was causing the consternation? The head torch on the woolly hat that failed to control the unruly hair? The mud-covered boots, trousers and coat? The bag full of paints, notebooks and scales? The box of electronics? The large TV aerial? Or was it the look of a man deeply tormented by the realization that at any moment he was going to find a flattened friend?

  Then the faintest signal, a lone beep. I walked faster and the beeps became clearer and louder, though still from the road. As I reached a small farmhouse, right on the road, the signal was so strong that I knew she was around there somewhere. And not on the road. A great feeling of relief rushed over me, but I had to stop. I really did not want to go poking around a stranger’s farm while everyone was still asleep. Too many close encounters with territorial dogs have taught me well.

  So, sure she was OK, I headed home for a nap. I was off familiar ground and decided to risk a short cut. The sun was teasing the few clouds and I was enjoying just being outside, so it was a shame to waste this walk on tarmac.

  I startled a small herd of red deer on the far side of a field, then, to my astonishment, they vanished. Was I that tired? I kept on towards where they had been. The hedge looked solid, but as I got closer I found the deer’s gap. I pushed through the small breach and entered another world.

  There were two lines of trees that had grown over, creating a verdant tunnel. The passage between them was sunken. I had entered a ‘green lane’. Green lanes are relicts of our transport history – they are the old, often redundant routes that have somehow managed to evade the depredations of modern life. This short green tunnel was once part of the main track over the hill. The sunken nature paid tribute to the thousands of feet that had passed that way.

  Most green lanes have been destroyed, either through development or neglect. This one was safe, even if only a segment remains. People rarely passed this way – not just from the absence of footprints, but also from the absence of rubbish.

  Try a short cut, walk, slowly, off the beaten track and allow yourself to get a little bit lost. I like that feeling, not knowing where I am but pretty sure of where I am going. It allows you a chance to get much closer to nature. So go poke your nose behind hedges; you never know what you might find.

  I could have wallowed in the beauty of it all for hours, but it was a long time since I was last asleep – and unless I was going to curl up against the ancient hedge bank, I had to keep moving. I wonder what dreams might have percolated through the soil?

  Returning to the farm at 10 a.m. after a couple of hours’ sleep, I introduced myself at the house and acquired the eager assistance of two young helpers, Denise and Kevin. We all searched among the remnants of old cars and farm machinery. Finally, after scrabbling through some undergrowth, the nest was found in the middle of a hedge. As I emerged, looking like I had been dragged through a hedge backwards (which was almost true), Denise passed judgement: ‘We don’t get many people like you down here.’

  Hettie required me to change my routine, as I now had to make sure I got to her while Denise and Kevin were still up. They were furious if I ever failed to get them out on the hunt.

  Soon after Hettie disappeared over the horizon, Hannah also did a ‘runner’, turning up at a farm about a kilometre north of the release farm. Again, the owners were very accommodating, if slightly bemused, as I wandered around their immaculate garden searching for clear bl
eeps. Sure enough, Hannah had made herself quite at home in a barn. What was going on? The males, not the females, were supposed to be the wanderers, searching far afield for female conquests.

  A possible answer was revealed when the vet came to do an interim health check on the hedgehogs. Hettie and Hannah were pregnant. Perhaps they had left ‘home’ in an attempt to escape the relative overcrowding of the study site, before giving birth to their babies – the best present any rehabilitation study could hope for.

  As the project began to draw to a close in mid-May, I took a detour from my regular work. I had been asked to appear on live TV, radio-tracking hedgehogs around a golf course in Nottingham for a show called Nightshift. I was so excited, but what a rude introduction to the reality of this sort of reality television.

  For my first bit to camera I had to stand with the radio-tracking gear, holding my stunt hedgehog. After a brief interview I put the hedgehog on the ground and off we went. As soon as the cameras stopped, I had to pick up the hedgehog and pop it back in its box. Then, three hours later, I was back out with my beast, in exactly the same place, only this time with the cameras and lights facing in the opposite direction. I put the hedgehog down again and made up a story of the foraging it had been doing in the intervening period. Now, I am sure that this was a one-off and that the BBC would never stoop so low again.

  And I never got to apologize to the staff at the five-star hotel I was put up in – it was probably the first time they had ever had a hedgehog spend a couple of nights. He was in a box in the bathroom and helped remind me why the European hedgehog is such an unsuitable pet – they stink.