Little Miss Tiggywinkle… ‘The prickly patients that changed my life!’

Tracy Pierce was devastated when ill health forced her to retire from nursing. But a garden visitor proved her caring days were not yet over…

We were busy clearing the garden of our new house in Prestatyn, North Wales, when I heard some squeaking coming from bags of garden waste.

At first, I thought it was a nest of rats, which, being a farmer’s daughter, didn’t faze me. Curious, I went to have a look and found a nest of tiny white hoglets – baby hedgehogs – squeaking away.

I covered them up to keep them warm, hoping their mum would soon return.

I’d grown up around animals and wildlife, so can you believe this was the first time I’d ever seen a live hedgehog? Little did I know these uninvited – but very welcome guests – would end up playing a huge part in my life…

I’ve always loved animals and caring for others. At the age of 18, I trained to be a nurse and my first job was looking after the elderly. After becoming a mum in 1992, I moved to the local community hospital and worked there for over 20 years. Again, it was mostly older people I was looking after; I absolutely loved it.

‘This is how I want to be looked after when I’m old,’ I used to think while going about my job.

But, in 2013, they shut my hospital. By then, I’d been struck down with fibromyalgia – which is linked to arthritis. Physically and mentally,

I was struggling.

I tried to adjust my working hours and the things I did in order to carry on in the job I loved but it got too much, so I retired in 2015.

I was devastated. Giving up my nursing career was a huge loss.

In the meantime, though, guess who’d come back into my life? One evening I’d spotted another hedgehog under my bird feeder and that reignited my passion for helping these wild, but increasingly scarce, creatures. I started putting food out and making nests for them and, as time went on, when neighbours found poorly ones, they’d bring them to me.

A lightbulb went on in my head, a ray of light after giving up work. ‘I can do this – I can make them better,’ I thought to myself.

I approached the British Hedgehog Preservation society to train as a hedgehog carer and did a course at the Vale Wildlife Hospital and Rehabilitation Centre. Caroline Gould has been running it for over 35 years. I learnt so much from her.

At home, I turned my garden shed into a mini hedgehog hospital.

That first year, I kitted it out with cages, incubators and heat pads – and we

overwintered eight hedgehogs.

My years of nursing experience were invaluable in dealing with these prickly customers. I was using my skills – but with a very different kind of patient!

In the past four years, Prestatyn Hedgehog Help has gone from strength to strength thanks to the support of friends, family and the community. Last Winter, we had 46 hedgehogs here and another 40 looked after by foster carers.

We don’t get any funding so we rely on donations, fundraising and volunteers.

Our day starts around 7am. We clean out the sheds, weigh the hedgehogs and give them their medications. We do the laundry and dishes, stock up on supplies and everything else that needs doing – it takes us about two-and-a-half hours. We have 32 hedgehogs at the moment.

I do all the poo testing myself, looking at it under a microscope to see what internal parasites are present.

Some people do stamp collecting or other hobbies

– I look at poo!

From what I find, I may start new treatments and in between this, I’ll get phone calls and other hedgehogs coming in. Wild animals are usually extremely poorly by the time they are found, so now the RSPCA send hedgehogs directly to us.

It’s sort of taken over my life, to be honest…

Over the Summer, one of our patients, Blondie, a rare blonde hedgehog, hit the news after being found collapsed on a path, weighing only 180g. We treated her for internal parasites, fluke and lungworm. Once she weighed 714g ( healthy grown hedgehogs weigh between 800g-1kg) we released her into the wild.

She’s just one of hundreds of hedgehogs we have saved over the past four years.

My nursing experience has really helped. A lot of the hedgehogs who come to us have nasty wounds – tangled up in rubbish, attacked by dogs or foxes – so I’m used to dealing with that sort of thing.

You have to treat hedgehogs with courses of injections because when they’re frightened, they curl up into a ball so no medicine is taken by mouth. You have to be careful with the dosage – they’re such small creatures that if you don’t get it right, you can do a lot of damage.

Obviously, being used to dealing with all sorts of bodily fluids helps as well, as they can be messy, depending on what’s wrong with them and their age.

Now, at 56, I’m in constant pain pretty much all of the time but having the hedgehogs helps take my mind off it. It’s given my life a new purpose… a reason to get out of bed.