by Hugh Warwick
And so, with this trip, came my life with hedgehogs. The stomach-churning hell I was enduring on the ferry was the beginning of a journey into a new way of seeing the world, much closer to the ground.
The series of unlooked-for steps that led me to this species has continued to this day, allowing me to develop an appreciation for the hedgehog that goes way beyond the sentimental relationship that can infect our contact with the natural world. This depth of relationship convinces me that the hedgehog has much to tell us about the way we live within what is left of the natural environment. This journey was the start of my transformation into a hedgehog advocate.
Though at the time all I could care about was getting off the bloody boat.
I was going so poorly equipped. To be honest, I had not really much of an idea about what I was going to do. Obviously I knew what a hedgehog looked like, and that there was only one species of hedgehog living wild in the UK. Heading east, there is a chance of bumping into Erinaceus concolor, known, unsurprisingly, as the eastern European hedgehog. Both species are about the same size, but the eastern one, found from around the Czech Republic, has a distinctive white patch of fur across its chest.
The two species evolved their distinct characteristics from a common species that bestrode the earth some 700,000 years ago. Along came ice ages that left pockets of these ancestors in the west and east of southern Europe, where, isolated and perhaps a little bored, they began to speciate, to form two individual species.
So what might happen on North Ronaldsay? Wait long enough and perhaps there will be another species. But back in 1986 the more immediate concern was whether the reports in the media of a plague of 10,000 hedgehogs were plausible. The case for the prosecution seemed to rely on this number, but it seemed unlikely that there could be so many, until I sat down with a pen and paper.
If the first couple, assuming it was a couple and not two pregnant females, had a litter of six the first year, and then assuming good survival over winter and, quite reasonably, an even gender split, that would mean four females for the next year. Each of these could have a further six – and possibly twelve if they squeezed a second litter in . . . so this would mean that, with the impossible situation of 100 per cent infant survival, there would be over 9,000 hedgehogs by the end of year six. I gave up then as the numbers got too long, but there was another four years of potentially exponential growth to consider. And that was assuming John Tulloch was the only islander smuggling hedgehogs.
Luckily, exponential growth tends not to carry on forever, unlike the journey to North Ronaldsay. From Leicester to Inverness, where the train carefully did not link up with the next one, the station was cold and the toilets were locked. Then the ferry to Stromness and the bus to Kirkwall. All in all, it would have been quicker to fly to Australia. And that still left the heaving journey by ferry to my destination.
Mainland Orkney is a wonderful place, riddled with history and some of the finest whisky money can buy. Highland Park is our most northerly distillery and, like many things on the seventy or so islands, started out in a fairly disreputable way. In the 1790s a local church officer took to hiding the product of his illicit still under the pulpit of his church.
The disreputable nature of the islands extends to the landscape. Orkney is not all flat. Hoy, for example, rears up out of the mist with the phallic greeting of the ‘Old Man’ as the ferry rolls by. And South Ronaldsay has sheer cliffs that have the added attraction of being home to some rather feisty ‘bonxies’. The Orcadians are happy to tell it like it is. While a bird may be better known as a great skua or even Stercorarius skua, if it has a habit of attacking misguided human interlopers with a powerful and plummeting thump to the head, it will be called a bonxie. And then there were the ‘pick a’terno’, another avian menace which makes its home on North Ronaldsay and was one of the reasons for my visit. They were thought to be suffering at the rapacious jaws of the humble hedgehog.
North Ronaldsay now has a regular air service and two boats a week. But in 1986 there were far fewer flights, all beyond my budget, and just the one ferry. This was a boat that was designed to accentuate every roll, every tilt, every yaw, swell and undulation. My teeth felt sick. I sat, fixated on the horizon, sweating. My lips turned grey.
Never has the sight of land been so appreciated, though it looked as if a single sizeable wave could swallow the low-lying island whole. Kevin came to greet me with Rosie and Fly – two wonderful collies, directly related to the stray that followed Kevin home one drunken night in Manchester as he was training to be a doctor.
Kevin and the dogs took me on a tour of the island, which, as it is only 20 kilometres in circumference, was brief. He rattled off the names of places as we sped past in his bone-shaking 2CV of multiple parentage: Gravity, Muckle Gersty, Haskie Taing, Trolla Vatn, Gretchen Loch and Bride’s Ness.
The beauty of the place and the names was only marred by his style of driving, which gave more attention to passing birds than the road.
That first night I decided to acclimatize myself, so, emboldened with whisky, I headed out into the dark. The single-track road runs away from you into a slight depression. The mist clung to the ground, as if I was wading into a grey and luminous sea. It had been a really bad idea to watch the film American Werewolf in London just before leaving England. After a few hours of meandering, I returned rather despondently, having seen not a single hedgehog.
In retrospect, my naivety was quite sweet. I was unprepared, untrained and dropped in at the deep end. Only just before boarding the ferry to the island did it dawn on me that a pair of gloves might be useful. And I had forgotten that I would need to work out a way of weighing the hedgehogs, so busy was I with just getting there. The weight of the hedgehogs is the simplest piece of data that I could collect – along with the sex and location. Who knew, maybe it would reveal something, so I borrowed a spring balance from the bird observatory and fashioned a container out of a plastic ice-cream tub in which to place the hedgehogs.
As for counting hedgehogs, they tend to look rather alike, so I marked each one individually. A thorough review of the scientific literature revealed that the best technique was to daub spots of paint on the spines. I had come equipped with small tester pots. But the only tester pots on sale were in lighter shades of this and that – no primary colours available. Pastel it was. This is where the weight of the hedgehogs helped, I found, as the colours were not always that distinct, but referring back to weight and sex helped narrow down the options.
The marking was simple. The first received a blob of ‘sea blue’ on the right shoulder, top left for the second, middle for the third, etc. Then there were combinations – so hedgehog number 46 was top-right yellow and bottom-left blue (and I couldn’t let the hundredth hedgehog pass without celebration. The poor female was branded with a beautiful combination of green, pink, blue and yellow). This all meant that I could identify where the hedgehogs had previously been found, keep track of their weight if they were caught more than once, and by some clever statistical manipulation hopefully calculate an estimate for the population from the proportion of animals that were recaptured. The technique is known as ‘mark, release, recapture’.
My supervisor had confidently expected me to find dozens of animals every night – but he was an ornithologist, used to waiting for birds to fly into nets, not having to hunt his prey. I walked the island, spending up to six hours a night being seduced by cow pats, tussocks of grass and stones, leaping over fences to capture non-existent hedgehogs.
So pitiful was the rate of capture that I began to experiment. First I took out Tarzan. A bear of a black Labrador, this slobber monster had developed a habit of picking up hedgehogs while out for a walk. And when I took him out, he did just that. But only one of the twelve hogs he found was female. This could either indicate a very strange population dynamic on the island or be a reminder that males smell more. But I stopped using Tarzan when I began to notice the blood. Not hedgehog blood; the daft dog
was so excited by this new game that he continued until his mouth was lacerated by a few too many spines.
The rate of capture was still so slow that I was willing to try anything. So after abandoning Tarzan I moved on to the idea of setting traps. There is not much of a market for hedgehog traps, so they are rather hard to come by. With the help of Kevin I set about knocking chicken wire and wooden boxes into quite the most amazing hedgehog traps the island had ever seen.
A simple one-way swing door leading to an enclosure baited with dog food, and, hey presto, we had created an utterly useless waste of time. Six traps out for fourteen days and just one hedgehog.
During midsummer there was no need for a torch, the sun dipping below the horizon for only a few minutes. And when the weather was kind, the night air was filled with the sounds of corncrakes, curlews and snipe.
There were nights when, for no discernible reason, I found not one single animal. Yet there were other nights when the place seemed to be crawling with them. And while, to begin with, I fretted about the lack of data, the more I got to know the island, the less it seemed to matter. North Ronaldsay has a magical quality and I was drawn into its idiosyncrasies.
The sheep, for example, are a raggedy bunch. The first thing you notice is that they are on the beach. This is not an accident; they live there and eat seaweed. The wall that surrounds the island is to keep them off the grass.
Each croft has an allotment of sheep, marked with specific ear cuts. But the sheep are not kept in individual herds – they roam the shoreline in delinquent gangs, only occasionally brought to book in what is possibly one of the last acts of communal farming in Britain.
My job was to stand in a line with about six other folk, holding up a fence that would gently guide the sheep into stonewalled ‘punds’. Another team of people had started further around the coast and were driving the sheep towards us. Now, I have helped on farms before, I have helped with sheep before, and on the whole, when confronted with a line of people being noisy and aggressive, sheep tend to do what is required. Not this lot: like the islanders, they are a belligerent bunch of freethinkers who paused, sized up weaknesses in the barrier and then charged straight at us, some managing to leap over by barging the human fence posts to the ground.
Their reluctance to be penned is understandable. While my dithering attempt at shearing must have been unpleasant, that is nothing to the process of castration. A small slice through the scrotum, a firm yank and the male lambs have the unenviable chance of seeing their balls thrown to the gulls.
My summer of fieldwork flew by remarkably quickly and, despite all the worry at the start, I had good data: some important and some unexpected. I was surprised by the high proportion of blond hedgehogs on the island; not albino, as they still had dark eyes, but around a third of the animals found had very blond spines. I still have an envelope with spines from the island and the banding that is common on most hedgehogs is almost entirely absent on some of these. It seems that this is an island trait, as many of the hedgehogs on Alderney in the Channel Islands are also blond. And I did not find a single flea on our adventure. It is possible that John Tulloch de-fleaed the original two, or that they had no fleas. And as there were no hedgehogs on the island before, there were no hedgehog fleas waiting for the newcomers.
The important news came from the census. There certainly seemed to be far fewer hedgehogs on the island than the newspapers had reported. For example, Stuart, the lighthouse keeper who had previously seen in the teens of hedgehogs each night, had seen only one hedgehog while I was on the island – he felt that there had been a catastrophic decline in numbers.
But so catastrophic that, from a potential population of 10,000, I found just 138 individuals? Was I spectacularly incompetent at finding hedgehogs? Was the prosecution’s case based on sound science, or was there something fishy about the figure in the first place?
Of those 138, I recaptured forty-eight. This allowed me to spend some time playing with the statistics, creatively juggling digits and revealing that it is possible to generate an answer that is clearly utter nonsense. Various techniques presented population estimates ranging from eight to 1,686. Spot the problem there? I had found 138 hedgehogs, so how could there have been only eight? Whenever you are confronted by scientists telling you something that relies on statistics, you are right to be cautious. I tried again, this time in the company of rather more expert players of the game, and came to the conclusion that, after all this, there were not 10,000 hedgehogs on the island, just 514 (plus or minus 100). This meant that I was 95 per cent certain that the number of hedgehogs on the island lay between 414 and 614. A summer’s work boiled down to a few numbers.
So, a massive decrease from the 10,000 reported. But then that figure needs to be looked at a little bit closer. What was actually said, by Kevin, was the factually correct statement that he estimated the population to be between 1,000 and 10,000; because broad estimates tend to be given by ‘factors’. He believed there to be over 1,000 hedgehogs but fewer than the next order of 10,000, so quite reasonably he gave both figures; and quite reasonably the journalist chose to discard the smaller number.
Knowing the number was only part of the deal. There was no doubt that some hedgehogs were eating some birds’ eggs. There was no doubt that the number of hedgehogs on the island had been seen to increase at the same time as the breeding success of these birds declined. But were hedgehogs the cause? On this first visit it was impossible to say.
There was talk at the bird observatory about what was best to do – being a man of action, Kevin really felt that something needed to be done about the hedgehogs. So he suggested airlifting the beasts back to where they had come from. Obviously this was just a joke. Who would pay for it? Where would the hedgehogs go? How would the animals be captured? Kevin talked about an adoption scheme where people would offer to rehome hedgehogs. He wondered whether this would appeal to Logan Air, the local airline, as something to give them publicity. Kevin was always full of ideas and some of them were just absurd; this one obviously fell into that bracket.
So I returned to England and the process of writing up my work and completing my degree. But just a few days later everyone knew about the hedgehogs on North Ronaldsay. By a strange coincidence, Kevin’s thoughts about getting people all over the UK to adopt hedgehogs from the island and an interview he did on local radio happened just as the Queen Mother, in Scotland on holiday, entered hospital for an operation. So there were TV crews hanging around waiting for something to do . . . and what better way to spend the time than to descend on a small island that had cooked up a barmy idea about getting hedgehogs adopted by people all over the UK to save the birds. Kevin and the TV crews got all the islanders out searching for hedgehogs, boxing them up and loading them on to a plane. It would be hard to concoct a more perfect ‘and finally’ story.
The results were extraordinary. Hundreds of letters came in from all over the country, the furthest being the Isle of fight. Logan Air stepped in, offering free flights for hedgehogs. Adopters arrived at Scottish airports and picked up their spiky cargo. TV crews came from all over the world and islanders came out in force for the cameras, searching the island for the illegal immigrants.
A Japanese journalist cornered one of the local children. The child just kept nodding and saying ‘aye, aye, aye’ to a stream of questions, neither party willing to admit that they could not understand a word of what was going on. There is probably an out-take TV show in Tokyo that generates many a chuckle from this clip.
In the case of hedgehogs v. birds, the prosecution preempted the verdict and deported the immigrants without any real evidence that they were the main problem, and without an idea of how many animals there were to start with. But its execution was a typically inspired response from Kevin.
Around 180 hedgehogs were shipped off the island over the next few years. Initially people who were adopting them arranged for transport from the mainland, but in later years hedgehogs were just dro
pped off on mainland Orkney to fend for themselves. Did this make a difference to the breeding success of the birds? We shall see.
Unaware of what was in store for me, I left North Ronaldsay and the hedgehogs, did an MSc, counted mice and voles for a while, went to Tanzania for three months doing conservation education work and then went to Morocco and unsurprisingly failed to find the – extinct – Barbary leopard.
But once bitten by the hedgehog bug it is hard to resist and in 1991, with the help of the Vincent Wildlife Trust, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the indefatigable zoologist Derek Yalden from Manchester University, I returned to the island, this time accompanied by my girlfriend.
The bird observatory was booming. Five years earlier Kevin had been pretty much alone, but now he had a team of volunteers working to create one of the most important birding centres in the country. And his environmental plans were also coming on apace. He had persuaded a university to run a wind-energy project at the observatory, giving him a turbine.
I got to know that turbine pretty well, as we pitched our tent beneath it. There is no mistaking the fact that wind turbines are noisy. But having spent three months sleeping beneath one, I can attest that they are nowhere near as noisy as a flysheet in the wind. And outside it was no more than the noise of trees.
On my first visit I had been an unwitting pawn; this time I wanted to set my own agenda and, while not acting directly for the defence, I wanted at least to ensure that the hedgehogs got a fair hearing. I wanted to see how many hedgehogs there were. Had the airlift made an impact? And I wanted to see what other threats the birds were facing. Were hedgehogs the only culprit?
Hedgehogs, and most mammals in fact, were still treated with disdain. The observatory was utterly split on taxonomic lines, with the obsessive birders condescending to allow mere mammal enthusiasts to share their table, though we did have to sleep outside.