Magical Creatures
APP F REC I ATION O N THE A HEDG EHOG
One of my earliest childhood memories is of standing at my grandfather’s window by night, watching a snuffling ball-shaped creature in the garden, making its unsteady way towards a dish of bread and milk. Fast forward 40-odd years and my adult self is appalled at ‘poisoning’ the poor lactose intolerant creature with milk and nutrient-poor white bread, but the past was a very different time, and the intentions were good.
I was lucky to grow up in a rural area where hedgehogs were a common sight. Driving home from night shifts during my student years, I would often see hogs the size of small cats, accelerating across the road to avoid the sparse small-hours traffic, seemingly having evolved beyond their natural temptation to curl up and hide from danger. Sometimes I would ‘rescue’ them, bundling my victim unceremoniously into a sweatshirt or box that happened to be in the car, until I deemed it a safe location for release. Goodness only knows how much confusion I caused them.
There’s an unthreatening cuteness to the hedgehog with its rotund form, twitchy pointed nose and myopic beady stare. Hedgehogs first appeared in Egyptian mythology, where their habit of hiding underground during lean seasons may have been responsible for their acquired mystique as creatures of resurrection. The Romans, Pliny the Elder in particular, were more impressed by the alleged fruit-carrying skills of the small spiky one. By all accounts, those spikes were used to skewer apples and grapes, which could then be transported back to the burrow for storage. In reality, apples do not feature in the diet of a hedgehog any more than milk stolen direct from the cow, as Irish myth would have it of the gráinneog or ‘little ugly thing’. Nor does it create a store cupboard for the winter, relying instead on its own meagre body fat to survive.
The grown-up me still has a tendency towards saving hedgehogs, although these days I know the difference between rescue and abduction. One lunchtime, on seeing a tiny hoglet – as baby hedghogs are known – staggering about on the side of the road in daylight (a bad sign), I popped it into my Waitrose trolley bag, opened a pouch of cat food for it that happened to be in my weekly shop, and called my local hedgehog rescue lady. My hoglet was weighed and deemed far too small to survive hibernation alone, so with the rescue lady he’d stay for a few months. The following spring, he was safely released.
I live in the countryside, where the hedgehog pantry is wild and plentiful, a feast of earthworms, caterpillars, beetles and slugs, but a dish of cat or dog food and some fresh water always goes down well and makes garden hog-spotting that much easier. And, with the native hedgehog population having halved in the past two decades, I think they need all the help they can get.