Where have the hedgehogs gone?
Dr Pat Morris has spent 50 years studying hedgehogs in Britain and been fittingly elected president of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. He has just published a substantial book about Erinaceus europaeus.
Morris writes in a charming, readable style, lightened with hundreds of entertaining anecdotes. His text is broken into bight-sized chunks, such as eating eggs, badgers as predators, poisons, ringworm, hedgehog popularity in Britain, and hedgehogs in New Zealand.
The book is further lightened with more than 300 pictures of hedgehogs swimming, climbing walls, copulating, appearing on postage stamps, trapped in cattle stops, sliced up in lawn mowers, and being cuddled by a Chelsea pensioner.
I thought I was quite well informed about hedgehogs until I read Morris’ Hedgehog .Ihadno idea that, in the early 20th century, 17,000 British game wardens killed hundreds of thousands of hedgehogs, labelled ‘‘vermin’’ because it was believed they ate pheasant and partridge eggs on shooting estates.
In fact, crows, foxes and stoats eat 95 per cent more pheasants’ eggs than hedgehogs.
I also learned that experiments prove that hedgehogs and otters dream. Morris has analysed vast data-sets on roadkill counted annually over 30,000 kilometres of British roads, as well as information from thousands of citizen scientists who have enabled him to make fine-grained maps of hedgehog abundance.
Hedgehogs were once abundant over the whole of England but their population has fallen dramatically over the last 50 years. Coincidentally, their numbers have crashed in New Zealand over the past 50 years as well.
There are as many explanations for these losses as there are specialists to dream them up, but it is most likely that the increasing use of pesticides has substantially cut into hedgehogs’ insect and grub diets.
British and Kiwi attitudes to hedgehogs are starkly different. In Britain, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle reigns supreme. By contrast our DOC and Forest and Birders wage a fatwa against them.
Morris’ wide-ranging book even includes two of Burton Silver’s Listener comic strips of Bogor and his hedgehog sidekick.
All in all, Hedgehog is an erinaceological tour de force.
In Britain, Mrs TiggyWinkle reigns supreme. By contrast our DOC and Forest and Birders wage a fatwa against them.