How you can help save Mrs Tiggy-winkle
WHen I was 23, I lived in the village of Stanford in the Vale, and every day I drove my decrepit, fume-filled Morris 1000 to Witney in Oxfordshire, where I worked as a secretary.
My journey took me past a wood called Hatford Warren, and each spring and summer morning would reveal the grisly red remains of numerous squashed hedgehogs on the road.
Hundreds of them must have lived in that wood. Certainly hundreds of them died on the adjacent highway, especially around this time of year when they’ve just emerged from their long winter hibernation. It was horrible to see such carnage, but the slaughter just seemed to be a fact of life.
In those days, the early Seventies, I spent my spare time performing my poems around the folk clubs which had sprung up everywhere.
The eyes of landlords in remote pubs lit up at the idea; they whitewashed a shed, hung a horse collar on the wall and, on what would otherwise have been a slow night, sold a lot of beer.
One of the first pieces I wrote was called In Defence Of Hedgehogs. It went down a treat: ‘It is statistically proven, in chapter and in verse, That in a car and hedgehog fight, the hedgehog comes off worse.’
It was a light- hearted appeal for people to take more care, and I cheerfully declaimed it for years, but I don’t perform it any more. The tone is wrong.
At that time, I never thought hedgehogs could become extinct, but I do now. They can’t compete. They are done for.
A report this year warned their numbers have fallen by half since the start of the 21st century, as hedgerows are lost, farming eats up their habitat, and pesticides kill off their food supply.
AnD I like hedge-hogs. They are benign little creatures, emerg-ing late at night to cruise our gardens, tug up a few earth-worms and crunch beetles. They have cute faces, bright button eyes and a shiny black nose.
They are also Britain’s only spiny mammal. As a child in rural Berkshire, it seemed wildlife was everywhere, limitless and for the most part, unprized. Birds’ eggs, the rarer the better, were collected into sawdust-filled boxes by children including me, gangs of boys ‘ ragged out’, or robbed, birds’ nests, and though I never saw it, I heard of hedgehogs kicked about like footballs.
There was no help for injured wildlife. The most you could hope for was somebody who would hit your casualty on the head and ‘put it out of its misery’.
So it was heartening when years later I met the wonderful Les Stocker MBe, who founded St Tiggywinkles in Buckinghamshire, the first wildlife teaching hospital — I took him several patients.
Ten years later, I became a supporter and, later, patron of our local wildlife rescue centre, Oak & Furrows, near Cricklade in Wiltshire.
They had hundreds of hedgehog patients and I started to learn about the ghastly fates which befall them — how they are burnt in bonfires, trapped in drains, attacked by dogs, drowned in pools, poisoned by slug pellets, injured by traffic and mutilated by the blades of mowers and strimmers.
Those hedgehogs, so poorly equipped to tackle modern life, gave me the idea for my book The Last Hedgehog. They made me determined to help, and I’ve learned there is plenty we can do, with even the smallest patch of space.
There are hedgehogs in my garden now, some of which were nursed back to health at the Oak & Furrows centre before being released here, and some of which, to my delight, have just turned up.
To help them, I leave out a shallow dish of clean water, and food — Spikes Hedge-hog Food and they like meaty dog or cat food, but not the fishy versions — when the weather is dry.
On damp nights, our untreated lawn is a fleshy lattice of earthworms, their favourite food.
One thing believed by all when I was growing up was that ‘ hedgehogs, they likes a drop of bread and milk’ but this is glaringly untrue. It makes them ill.
My neighbour Bill kindly made me two wooden hedge-hog boxes, to the free pattern available on the British Hedgehog Preservation Society website.
This winter a hedgehog hibernated in one. Soon he will be looking for a mate and I am hoping Mrs Hedgehog will consider the box suitable for breeding purposes and that we might see babies.
In all my endeavours I am much helped by having a Detective Dog. I adopted a little terrier from Chelten-ham Animal Shelter and trained her to find hedge-hogs without harming them. She goes into the garden, sniffs the night air, scuttles over to any lurking hedge-hog, then sits and waits for a treat. She is a dog genius.
I will continue to do all I can to help reverse the hedgehog’s decline. They are an irreplaceable link in the complex, interdependent chain of our natural world.
And they have shiny black noses.
The Last hedgehog by Pam Ayres, with illustrations by Alice Tait, is published by Picador on May 3, priced £6.99.