The Hedgehog's Dilemma

by Hugh Warwick

  After the first year the tally was 150 rescued, sixty-six killed, though to be honest the figures are not entirely fair. A great deal of the effort of the cullers was applied to the island of North Uist, where there were the fewest hedgehogs. Their plan, and there is no denying its logic, was to work down the island chain, clearing all before them. I am sure there was a ‘situation room’ somewhere with a large map and pieces, representing hedgehogs, birds, cullers and rescuers, being pushed around by uniformed women in A-line skirts and sensible shoes, while the top brass of SNH looked down, twiddling their moustaches. Yet despite the skirts and moustaches, by 2006, after four years of culling, the rescuers were beating the killers by 756 to 658.

  Killing hedgehogs is not cheap. At first glance it might seem logical that culling would be cheaper. There is none of the expense of transporting and housing the hedgehogs. But the reality was very different. In the first year SNH spent £90,000 on the Uist Wader Project – and all that money went on the programme to eradicate hedgehogs. They killed sixty-six, so that works out at £1,363 per hedgehog.

  Now, over the next three years they did get better at catching hedgehogs, but still the average cost for killing each one hog was around £1,000.

  Of course, I am not being entirely fair with this calculation. The rescuers were volunteers, working for expenses only. And even when they were paying £20 to locals for each hedgehog brought in, the total cost was only around £50 to get hogs from the islands to release points on the mainland.

  But the money to kill the hedgehogs was from the taxpayer, taken without consent to do something that many people objected to. The money to rescue them was voluntary contributions to a charity.

  One very crucial question seemed to have been ignored, something so crucial that it amazed me. A publicly funded body could get away with spending hundreds of thousands of pounds without seeming to address it. Would the project work? Would SNH be able to kill all the hedgehogs on the Uists and, if they could eradicate the hogs, would that ensure the birds’ survival?

  I received assurances from the SNH spokesman that their aim was to completely remove hedgehogs from the Uists. How feasible would that be?

  The only way to work that out is through ‘modelling’. This is a mathematical exercise where you first of all make assumptions, based on information already collected, and then make a series of logical predictions to look at what might happen when different scenarios are played out. In this way you can work out whether it is actually possible to achieve the desired outcome.

  But SNH had no modelling data to show how they expected to achieve the eradication of hedgehogs. So some researchers from the University of London decided to have a go themselves, and came to the disturbing conclusion that if 712 hedgehogs were removed every year, the population of hedgehogs would be maintained in a steady state.

  In the four years from 2003 to 2006, SNH managed to kill a total of 658 hedgehogs. So that means despite over £500,000 being spent, the number of hedgehogs on the islands might have actually increased. Combining the cull with the rescue makes it look a little more respectable, as 756 hogs were trans-located, but still that is well below the sort of level required to achieve eradication.

  This is not to say that eradicating a species is not possible. The campaign against the coypu in East Anglia was successful. After escaping from fur farms in the 1930s, these large South American aquatic rodents made themselves at home in the British countryside, undermining the river banks and dykes with substantial burrows. Eradication began in 1964 and the last one was seen in December 1989. But coypu were undeniably alien, while hedgehogs are just slowcoaches.

  To try to increase their hit rate, SNH announced that they were going to use a new tool: dogs. As I found in North Ronaldsay, dogs can be very effective at finding hedgehogs – and I was just using an enthusiastic amateur. But there are professionals out there with noses that can be fine-tuned to detect a hedgehog at a hundred paces.

  So where is the problem with that? Find the hedgehog with a dog – it does not touch them, just points. Then take it off for its little injection.

  Oh, but the clever people at Uist Hedgehog Rescue spotted something. The change in the law that prevented hunting with hounds also meant that if a mammal was found with a dog, it would have to be either flushed to a bird of prey or shot. Now, hedgehogs don’t flush very well, as any plumber will tell you, and there are few birds of prey capable of tackling one – though eagle owls can take them. That leaves shooting, there in the field. What a PR problem – at least a lethal injection was discreet, but shooting would leave patches of bloody prickles as very clear markers around the islands. Unsurprisingly, when they realized that they could not change the law just to suit themselves, SNH gave up this unpalatable option. However, in terms of the welfare of the hedgehog, something that SNH professed to be so concerned about, a shotgun to the head is the simplest mode of execution, with no time for the animal to become stressed. They might not like it, thanks to the bad publicity, but it would be better for the hedgehog.

  One of the problems we faced was that SNH continued to maintain that translocated hedgehogs would suffer. And while we were confident that previous research showed they would be fine, this was dented by an unexpected broadside from Professor Stephen Harris of Bristol University. I had long been an admirer of his work on mammals, and he was rightly considered to be an important researcher in his field. But then came this call – he was furious. He wanted to know why the BHPS had refused to fund a study of his that showed a very high mortality of rescued Uist hogs.

  I immediately got in touch with the society. The answer to his question was quite simple. He had been refused funding because his study was too small to meet the needs of SNH. So even if it had been 100 per cent successful, it would have made no difference to their position.

  But he left me with a niggling worry: perhaps there was something about the Uist hedgehogs that made them prone to a rapid demise on the mainland.

  So in 2005 I suggested that we undertake (have you noticed the change from ‘they’ to ‘we’? I had been recruited on to the board of the BHPS) our own study. Not one that would meet the needs of SNH, but something simple to see if rescued hedgehogs really did just curl up and die.

  We only had a small budget, but I managed to find an experienced radio tracker, a release site and some pretty amazing accommodation. In fact, I was rather jealous. My accommodation while previously hedgehogging has been rather basic: a tent or a draughty and damp caravan. But I managed to secure my tracker a heated cottage right in North Ayrshire’s Eglinton Country Park, where she would be working. It had everything you could dream of; it was dry, warm and had a bath. I had also found a recent graduate, Douglas Walker, who was willing to work as an assistant for expenses to gain experience in the field.

  What could go wrong?

  The radio tags were ordered and I found I could borrow the receivers I had used in Devon ten years before – they were rather doddery, but just about up to the task.

  And then the bombshell: my tracker ran off to something more exciting. What could be more exciting than a month in early spring in the wild wasteland of North Ayrshire with the expectation of persistent rain penetrating your soul? A tropical beach counting turtles probably – the lightweight.

  There are not many people qualified to do this sort of work and finding a replacement at short notice was going to be tough. My wife pointed out that I was perfect for the job. After getting clearance from the Charity Commission that being a BHPS trustee didn’t interfere with me doing the work, I rewaxed my Barbour and prepared for a return to the field.

  Having dumped my stuff at the comfortable cottage (I would have felt rather guilty if I had set this up for my own benefit), I headed off to Hessilhead Rescue Centre to meet my new friends and attach the little radio transmitters that would allow me to pry into their lives at least once a night.

  The next morning was my one chance to get a bit more familiar with the park before
the real work started when the hedgehogs arrived at dusk. In 1839, the grounds of Eglinton hosted the UK’s last tournament, an attempt to rekindle knightly sensibilities, complete with jousting and armour. All it did was bankrupt the family. The heavens opened, drenched the crowds and a report from the time was rather damning in the faintness of its praise: ‘Two knights ran towards each other, at a very moderate pace indeed, and attempted to poke each other with their poles, mistakenly called lances, in a manner so utterly harmless that a child need scarcely have dreaded the encounter. Not a single knight was unseated, or even made to reel in the saddle.’

  The grand house is now derelict and, while the grounds are maintained, the car parks are used for practices that might have caused Lord Archibald Eglinton to ‘reel in his saddle’ and consider if it was really worth the effort to rekindle chivalry. When I first searched the internet for information about Eglinton, I was presented with the best dogging locations in Ayrshire. Apparently the top car park is better.

  Preparing for the first night in the field was exciting. It was so long since I had been out tracking hedgehogs, following their little lives, having the chance to be close to them and get to know them. And now I was doing it from a luxurious base and with the eager help of Douglas.

  Actually, having Douglas there did put on a little pressure. It was over ten years since I had done any serious radio-tracking and I did not want to show myself up in front of him.

  So when one of the first hedgehogs we released vanished into thin air, I had a feeling that it might all go horribly wrong. In the end the only possible explanation was that her transmitter didn’t work properly, unless she had developed the power of flight.

  With all twenty hedgehogs out in the park, we fell into a routine. Sleep from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. (if lucky), breakfast, write up data, lunch, check day nests, supper and back out at 9 p.m. While out radio-tracking the aim was to weigh all the hedgehogs. This would give us a good indication of how they were coping with their new life on the mainland.

  I felt revivified – working outside, close to nature, getting muddy and tired, it was glorious. At least, that is how I was remembering it until I reread some of the diary entries I made: strange how time can moderate memories of hardship.

  I had completely forgotten how much I hate Araldite, the glue we used to attach the transmitters to the spines of the hedgehogs. My fingers were raw for days. And the sleep, I had really managed to hide that away in my subconscious, but there is one entry that sums up a lot of how I was feeling in the first week or two: ‘Sleeping 0400–0900 is not enough.’

  There were other complications. The leads for the receivers were unpredictable, as were the aerials. And it rained a lot. Not only does this make the work harder, wet vegetation hindering the signal, but, as I began to remember from earlier sessions in the rain, the radio receivers come with the strict injunction do not expose to moisture.

  Inevitably the receivers got damp and inevitably they stopped working. In a particularly poor spell of weather we benefited mightily from Douglas’s girlfriend’s car. We would find a hog, then get back into the car and stick the receiver on the hot-air blower for twenty minutes.

  The hedgehogs: well, they behaved like normal hedgehogs, but they also gave me one hell of a fright. This entire exercise was undertaken in order to see if rescued Uist hedgehogs were unusual: whether they fulfilled the SNH prediction of ‘slow and lingering death’. I have to be honest and admit there was a part of me that wondered whether the hedgehog rescuers were going to have to eat a little humble hedgehog pie. SNH had been so determined that there was reason to cull that, even though this contradicted my own work, I was apprehensive.

  The first morning after the release we headed out to find the day nests. Most were easy to locate but one signal came from a dense rhododendron bush. Struggling into the depths was hard work, but I needed to check that hedgehog number 234 was in one piece. If only she had been. I pushed under another branch and was suddenly confronted with a headless corpse. I found her snout to one side and her lower jaw a bit further away. I pulled her out and we had a chance to see what had happened. I think it must have been a dog, as a wild predator would have been foolish to leave such a meal. I can imagine a dog rushing into the undergrowth and being called back by their human, unable to finish what they had started.

  At least this was not a slow and lingering death.

  Two days later, Douglas came back from the day-nest check looking grim. He had found the remains of hog number 274, just the skin and spines with the transmitter still attached. There was no mistaking the grubby pawprint of Mr Brock.

  This was confusing. I had been assured that none of the rangers had ever seen a badger in the park. But as the weeks passed, it dawned on me how this contradiction could exist. There is a transition in the park – the rangers leave, there is a pause and then comes trouble. So whether it was the quad-bikers forcing us to dive into the undergrowth, the NEDs (‘non-educated delinquents’ – a rather pejorative shorthand used by the locals) with their Buckfast Tonic Wine, the lunatics with torches so bright that they singe the retina and dogs so demented as to make you wish for a gun, the fires that are lit and the rubbish that is left, the rangers just leave well alone and clear up in the morning.

  So, the rangers were being quite honest about never seeing a badger in the park because they were never in the park at night.

  Then the next night . . . why do I do this? I started to name the hedgehogs, slowly, and the first to be named was Blondie. She was, unsurprisingly, rather blonde. And we found her floating in the small river that runs through the park. Hedgehogs can swim pretty well, but they cannot swim forever, hence the need to provide escape ramps from ponds.

  Blondie must have struggled and struggled to get out of the steep-banked brook. The only way I could get her body was to dangle, Douglas holding on to a tree with one hand and the strap of my Barbour bag with the other. Thank you, Barbour, for your reinforced stitching.

  After the initial flurry of disappointment, things settled down and I began to relish the night, the noises amplified by the loss of light, especially the sedge warblers, fighting in song over their patches of reed bed.

  But I would have liked more moon. Previous hedgehog forays have occurred with a goodly degree of moon. Moon shadows gladden the heart when you are out all night. But this April was poorly provisioned and it left me feeling quite lonely. The moon, when given a chance by the clouds, was shirking, heading for the horizon before the sky had properly darkened.

  One night I bumped into an old man who lived alone in a very isolated little cottage in the middle of the park. ‘You saving up for a TV?’ he said as he saw me approach with the radio-tracking aerial.

  Beyond his cottage was a farm, the new home of hedgehog number 385. I had to walk through a field of bullocks and it was like going into an unfamiliar inn and having everything fall silent as the locals just stop and look.

  I did not linger after checking the hedgehog was in a proper nest. And she seemed pretty settled, staying around the farm for a few days, keeping her weight up, until one day I found her lying dead in the middle of a field. I bagged her up and cycled back to the cottage with the corpse dangling from my handlebars.

  This one really needed an autopsy. The next morning I headed over to Hessilhead and persuaded Andy Christie, one of the founders of the sanctuary, to have a look and see if there was anything obviously wrong. I flexed her limbs and Andy just touched the tight flesh with the new scalpel blade. She opened up easily. ‘Oh, they are so like a mole,’ Andy exclaimed as he started to root around inside her. Peering over his shoulder, it was easy to see why it is so fascinating. A mole and a hedgehog could not appear more different, but the way they are set up on the inside is remarkably similar.

  There was food in her gut, so she had still been eating. There were a few nodules on her lungs that might have interfered with her breathing. Then we saw a marble-sized lump attached to the bladder. It was hard and was obs
tructing the flow of urine. This poor hedgehog had a tumour. While it was sad to lose another hedgehog, at least it was clear that this beast had died from a pre-existing condition.

  Still I was nervous. The project seemed to be haemorrhaging hedgehogs and I was going to have to admit that, perhaps, SNH was right to order a cull. But the rest of the month passed without major mishap. The odd run-in with NEDs on quad bikes added a frisson of danger. But I was getting fitter and relishing being out in the relative wild. A robin flew into the cottage as I was writing up my notes. I caught it and marvelled at how little there is inside the puff of feathers. The data were, despite the losses, looking good. If you discounted events that were unrelated to the fact that the animals had been translocated, such as the pre-existing tumour or the run-in with a badger, then the survival rate was 80 per cent – and if I included all the mortality, then there was still a two-thirds survival – quite good when compared to the 100 per cent death rate of those being captured by SNH.

  Nearly all the remaining hedgehogs were steadily increasing in weight. They were regularly seen courting with the resident hogs and they were shifting around the park with increased confidence.

  The project had to end and the last night was horrendous. We needed to find each hedgehog and clip off the transmitter so that it could be reused. But it was pouring with rain. The receiver would work briefly before succumbing to the torrents, at which point we would have to retreat to the car to stick it on the blower for a while.

  Eventually all were collected and I returned home to begin the task of making sense of what I had found and to get it published in a scientific journal, as without that it lacked credibility.