Hands off city hedgehogs

OPINION than 7000 hedgehogs up Otago’s braided riverbeds where black stilts, black-fronted terns and wrybills nest.

The Animal Health Board killed thousands of hedgehogs in Otago and South Canterbury.

To protect nesting kiwis, more than 800 hedgehogs were killed in Trounson Kauri forest and, to protect dotterels nesting in Northland sand dunes, 400 hedgehogs were killed there.

These days, many of the nesting areas are protected by new kinds of traps and wire-net hedgehogproof fences. Ninty-five hectares of Otago have been fenced off to protect the endangered Cromwell chafer beetle.

Hedgehogs are quite numerous in the bush up north, largely because those areas are almost frost-free. The milder winters allow hedgehogs to hibernate for a very brief time, if at all, so they can breed almost the year round.

Cold wet winters limit their numbers in the bush further south. Tens of thousands of possum, rat, and cat traps in the Rimutaka Range bush caught only 17 hedgehogs between 1967 and 1986.

Conservationists will be pleased to learn that hedgehog numbers have nosedived dramatically over most of the North Island since they peaked in the 1950s. Not so in the east coast of the South Island where plenty are still squashed along State Highway 1.

Anti-hedgehoggers think the only good hedgehog in New Zealand is a dead one. Indeed, they have already extinguished them in several bush sanctuaries and from Quail, Rangitoto and Motutapu Islands.

But, I hear you cry, what about hedgehogs round town? Must we hammer them too?

It seems to me that hedgehogs do a good job in keeping down snails and slugs in city gardens and they help to control grass grubs and porina moths on open