How I fell in love with a beautiful blonde ... hedgehog!
And, says this wildlife author, if you’re lucky enough to meet Britain’s rare white Tiggywinkles, your heart will be pricked too
the first blonde I caught was on the golf course, always a good place to find them. I found her — I think she was female but you can never be sure without a really close look — by the light of a torch, simply glowing in the beam.
She was a classic nocturnal type, charming, bright of eye and winning of expression. But her demeanour was, truth to tell, a trifle prickly. Which is fair enough, I suppose, because she was a hedgehog. Yes, a blonde hedgehog.
And I might just have made the vital connection in finding out how she got here.
I write these words on Alderney, one of the Channel Islands, population 2,000 — people, not hedgehogs — and just three square miles.
It is a remarkable place for many reasons: the blonde hedgehogs are just one more singularity in a singular place.
It’s hard to beat a blonde hedgehog for charm. Catch them in torchlight and they don’t even curl up. They might run away a little, hareing off at a steady 3 mph, but they’re not serious about it.
This is an island, and that changes everything — for hedgehogs just as much as humans. The hedgehogs live in a paradise without predators.
Alderney has no foxes, no badgers, no stoats or weasels. There are feral cats and the odd unruly dog to worry about, but for the most part, this is the island where hedgehogs are kings. And queens, of course.
And about 60 per cent of them really are blonde. This is a genetic quirk, one that tends to drain colour from an individual. They’re not albinos: albinism takes out almost all colour and brings in pink eyes as well.
This is a condition called leucism, which produces a washed-out effect. Blonde, in short.
It’s a recessive gene: you can carry it without being blonde yourself. It is only expressed when two carriers of the gene get together.
And here on Alderney, the blondes outnumber the rest, snuffling noisily across the island on their nightly food-hunting forays. They are studied by the excellent Alderney Wildlife Trust. And, naturally, the staff wonder why the blondes are doing so well here.
It seems that they have a positive advantage over the normal dark-coloured beasts.
On the mainland, the reverse would be true: the blondes stand out from the landscape like film stars, and they would make an easy target for predators. But here, in this predator-free place, the blondes prosper; doing better than the brunettes.
‘ One possibility is that people just like them, and feed them when they come to their gardens,’ says Roland Gauvain, from the trust. ‘They’re also easier to see when you catch them in your headlights.’
either way, the blonde hedgehogs dominate a population of around 600.
But how did they get here? hedgehogs have many fine qualities, but they’re not known as great Channel swimmers. They certainly didn’t get here by themselves. They weren’t known on the island before 1939. When World War II came, the place was evacuated and left to the Germans; to this day the island is full of German fortifications. Alderney has always been a handy spot strategically and people have been building forts here for 2,000 years.
The island was re- colonised when peace came in 1945.
DURING the complex process of making the island home again, a few people thought that it would be nice to have a hedgehog or two in the garden.
nothing official, nothing documented: just a whim of one or two islanders. Back then you could do such things. Two, perhaps even three pairs were released into gardens. From there, they got out and conquered the island.
It’s always been a local myth that the hedgehogs were released from a harrods bag. But investigation by the wildlife trust actually confirms this was true: one, perhaps two of these pairs were acquired from the store and brought out to the island.
This is not as outlandish it might seems. harrods ran an animal department — Pet Kingdom — until 2014. Before the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, it sold an astonishing range of beasts.
In 1967, Ronald Reagan, the then governor of California and future u.S. president, wanted an elephant, symbol of the Republican Party, for a political rally.
The story is that he rang up and asked: ‘Do you have an elephant for sale?’ he got the reply: ‘African or Asian, sir?’ Reagan duly purchased a baby elephant.
Two Australian backpackers settled in the Kings Road in Chelsea in the Sixties and bought a lion from harrods to keep in their flat.
When it got too big, they shipped it to Kenya, where it was released — no doubt bewildered and wondering where the next party was being held.
harrods certainly sold hedgehogs. In the Fifties, a schoolboy called John Burton used to supply them. he caught the animals in Biggin Wood in South London. ‘I got five bob a time,’ he says. ‘It was good business.’
no one would approve of this these days, of course, least of all Burton. he is now head of the World Land Trust, committed to saving land for wildlife across the world. This is wildlife conservation at the sharp end, and Burton has dedicated his life to it.
‘Obviously, taking hedgehogs from the wild isn’t something I’d dream of doing these days,’ he says. ‘ It was 60 years ago, a different world. Back then, David Attenborough was collecting animals from the wild for his great, pioneering Zoo Quest TV programmes which began in 1954.’ he adds: ‘ Collecting hedgehogs was part of the way I learned to love the wild. When it became clear that the wild world was in trouble, I wanted to do something about it. I’ve been doing it ever since.’ his World Land Trust finances local rangers and guards in wild places across the world under its Keepers Of The Wild programme. Many of these excellent people were hunters and poachers before changing sides. They are people with a deep knowledge and a love of the places where they live, and it required a very small adjustment for them to dedicate their lives to conservation. I have had the pleasure of meeting many of them myself, in Brazil, Paraguay, Borneo and Armenia: great people doing a great job.
SO The boy hedgehoghunter from Biggin Wood grew up to become one of our great conservationists, showing that times and people change as our understanding of the world develops.
In the meantime, the blonde hedgehogs of Alderney continue their inoffensive lives, snuffling round the bushes and brakes of the island in search of tasty invertebrate life, which can be found in great profusion here thanks to the astonishingly low levels of pollution.
Of course, they are unaware that their ancestors came from a small patch of surviving woodland in South London via a shop in Knightsbridge (where I worked myself one Christmas as a packer).
They may be an introduced species, but no one wants them to go. The islanders love them and they take pride in their existence; meanwhile visitors drop in for their brief stays and leave entranced, often after an encounter of their own.
The blonde hedgehogs are an irresistible invitation to love the wild world, and to want to save it.
It begins with an ‘aaaah’ response to the sight of a gorgeous blonde and leads logically to the urge to undo some of the wrongs we have done to wildlife — and supporting the World Land Trust is as good a way of doing that as I know.
Don’t take my word for it — Sir David Attenborough has said the same thing.
So let’s give a cheer for blonde hedgehogs, shining out in the torchlight, and never troubling to roll up when you approach. You might almost fool yourself that they were smiling at you . . .