The hedgehog whisperers
Everyone’s favourite prickly mammal is vanishing from rural areas, but as Hugh Warwick Warwick discovers, our gardens offer hope.
How does a suburban garden end up with a hoard of hungry hedgehogs running riot on the lawn? Is it unusual to have five of them at a time gorging on a mixture of pet food and mealworms? Or to have two fighting around your feet as you drink wine with friends on the patio? As I ponder these questions, it very quickly becomes clear that this is not just about hedgehogs.
“We went through 20kg of sunflower hearts in December alone,” David Sage tells me as he points out the various feeders dotted around his back garden. It’s in Chippenham, Wiltshire, and not especially large – just like hundreds of thousands of others, in fact. On this cold January morning, the feeders are buzzing with birds. Goldfinches have control of the bounty at the moment, with dunnocks picking up the pieces on the ground.
I first heard about David and Jackie Sage’s garden from the photographer Nick Upton. Nick and I were queuing for coffee at a conference called New Networks for Nature when he pulled out his phone and asked if I wanted to look at some photos. In the same way that people are shown pictures of babies, cats or dogs, I tend to be shown hedgehogs. And at first I was a little worried (I hate having to be ‘polite’). I need not have worried: Nick has captured some amazing images.
But that got me thinking about the garden, the people and the surroundings of this wonderful array (which is the formal collective noun for hedgehogs). What were the Sages doing that was so special, if anything? Were they in a wildlife hotspot? And what can the rest of us learn from this fecund garden?
David and Jackie are certainly enthusiastic bird feeders, but their garden is not given over to wildness – it works alongside wildness. The lawn and borders would not look out of place in any suburban setting. Yes, there are plenty of birds visiting, but it is not a list of exciting rarities, just a solid collection of what you would hope for: blackbirds, starlings roosting in the laurel, pied wagtails, blue, great, coal and long-tailed tits, a pair of bullfinches, chaffinches, house martins under the eves in summer and the occasional flyby of a hungry sparrowhawk.
TELL-TALE SIGNS
Nocturnal mammals are always going to be harder to spot, yet there are ways of knowing they’re around. “We knew we had hedgehogs in the garden because of the tell-tale droppings,” Jackie explains over a cup of tea. ‘But it wasn’t until we saw one that it really sunk in that we had exciting visitors. And I thought if I put a bit of food and water out, maybe they would come back again.”
It was the start of a relationship that has blossomed over the last 15 years. The hedgehogs did come back, and they brought their friends. Jackie reckons they saw nine individuals last summer. “Some have very different looks. Spike had a dark patch of hair on his forehead in the shape of a diamond. In the years after he first appeared, there were other hogs with a similar patch, so I presume they were related.”
So are Jackie and David kept up all night? Well, sometimes they seem to be, but the couple rely on two other techniques for hedgehog spotting. First, the increasingly popular and wonderfully effective trail camera – which is a good job as the activity they record peaks at 3–4am. The second is more unusual: Lester, their cat. I am introduced to this feline hedgehog whisperer as I settle onto the Sages’ sofa. I’m deeply suspicious of cats. Being fond of the birds that visit my garden, I discourage them with a water pistol. But Lester, despite the occas occasional ‘accident’, has a valuable wildlife-watchi wildlife-watching skill. He is fascinated by hedgehogs. All his humans
have to do is wait on a summer even evening for him to search the garden and then stop, focused on where a hedgehog is rumbling through the undergrowth.
For most hedgehogs, this is about as bothered as they get; unlike some hedgehog lovers, Jackie and David do not have to intervene unless there is a clear problem. Partly this is common sense, but also Jackie is quite keen not to have her life overtaken by becoming the local ‘hedgehog-woman’. It takes a special sort of person to enjoy being bothered by folk who want you to rescue their hedgehog.
When the Sages do intervene, it’s specifically to help hedgehogs out in the day, or any individuals they find heavily infested with ticks. Again, common sense prevails. If a burly hog with a tick happens to be passing, the couple leave it alone, but a youngster carrying a host of ticks is picked up and given the tweezer treatment. David shows me a photograph of a bowl containing over 50 of the blighters, just from a single small hedgehog.