Hedgehogs in Fiction - and in Fact, by Elizabeth Kay

 

Hedgehogs are the UK's favourite mammal with more Google searches and Instagram hashtags than any other animal. They are now listed as vulnerable on the UK's red list of mammals – however, this only holds true for the countryside. In suburban gardens they are doing very well indeed.

I attribute this to the plummeting cost of trail cameras. I have had one for several years, when it was a very expensive piece of kit. These days, you can get perfectly good ones on Amazon for £50. I put mine out one night in March to see what was digging in one of our vegetable beds. The culprit, unsurprisingly, was a fox. But scuttling away a bit later on was a hedgehog.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d lived in the house for twelve years, a stone’s throw from the M25, and never seen one – because they’re nocturnal. But more and more people are discovering them, thanks to their cameras, and doing exactly what I did – putting out food. And now they’re thriving; there’s a Facebook group called Hedgehogs! With over 28,000 members.

The baby hedgehog fracture
clinic at Wildlife Aid

Since March, they have entertained us every morning, when we look at what the cameras have captured overnight from the “rut” in April to the babies in September. We’ve had one with a broken leg, which was fixed by the wonderful Wildlife Aid and returned to us 6 weeks later. Aptly named Limpy, he was very recognisable as he has such a dark face. The first night he was back, much bigger and fighting fit, he had a major confrontation with our resident male, Bramble, over a female. And a few weeks later we had a new litter of babies, all with very dark faces…

Fictional hedgehogs you may have encountered...

Alice in Wonderland

Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet-ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingos, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches. The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo; she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away…

 Sonic the hedgehog – a computer game. 

Sega president decided that Sega needed a flagship series and mascot to compete with Nintendo's Mario franchise. The protagonist was initially a rabbit able to grasp objects with prehensile ears, but the concept proved too complex for the hardware. The team moved on to animals that could roll into a ball, and eventually settled on Sonic, a hedgehog. Sonic's colour was chosen to match Sega's cobalt blue logo, his red and white shoes were inspired by Michael Jackson, and his personality was apparently based on Bill Clinton's “can-do” attitude. Rolling into a ball is something hedgehogs do very well, and it's easy to see where the idea of using them as croquet balls came from.

 

 

Spiny Norman is a recurring character from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Dinsdale Piranha, a psychopathic gangster, believes Norman is watching him. Norman can be anything from 10 feet long to 600 yards, depending on how depressed Dinsdale is at the time. The stuff of nightmares, Norman travels round Britain looking for Dinsdale.

Hedgehogs are mentioned in The Chronicles of Narnia. Hogglestock is the only one actually named, who Caspian meets when he is introduced to the talking beasts who are in hiding from the Telmarines.

 The Hare and the Hedgehog was published in the 5^th edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It’s a reflection on class, with the hare being the landowner and the hedgehog being the serf. It’s easiest just to give you a link to the Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hare_and_the_Hedgehog

The most famous of all is probably Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, by Beatrix Potter. A little girl called Lucie loses three pocket handkerchiefs, and she eventually spies them drying on a hillside. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is a washerwoman, dressed in an apron and cloth cap, who launders all the clothes for the little animals and birds. Lucie ends up helping her deliver them.

However, when she turns to look behind her she sees that Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is a hedgehog and not a washerwoman at all. The narrator tells the reader that some thought Lucie had fallen asleep on the stile and dreamed the encounter, but if so, then how could she have three clean handkerchiefs and a laundered pinafore?

Potter had a pet hedgehog, which used to sit on her knee so that she could draw and paint him. It’s likely that he had a very unhealthy life, being fed the wrong things and kept awake during the day. Eventually he became very ill, and sadly she had to chloroform him herself. The name has stuck, though, and there is a fantastic hedgehog rescue hospital called Tiggy-Winkles. It’s well worth a visit, as they admit other animals as well, and the baby hedgehog special care unit is a joy to behold, with little snuffly noses poking out of their blankets.

The nice thing about hedgehogs is that they don’t have many enemies, apart from badgers and cars. But the rolling up reflex doesn’t always serve them as well as it should, for although it’s an excellent defence against predators it’s not much use against a bonfire.

They have a very complicated musculature, with each individual spine having its own mechanism. It can therefore raise spines in the area in which it feels most threatened. They can bite, too, and have been known to hunt and catch small animals although it mainly feeds on invertebrates. Of course, hedgehogs do hibernate during the winter, the only British mammal that does apart from the dormouse. Ours have all decided enough is enough this winter, with the wet and windy weather, although one did pop out on Christmas Eve. They spend a long time stuffing their nests with dead leaves and straw, until you think they can’t possibly fit any more in the chamber, and I suspect we have several individuals safely tucked up inside. Lifting the lids and looking within would disturb them, not a good thing to do, as the nests are so tightly packed with bedding that you’d have to rummage around to find them. And they only get fleas when there’s something else wrong with them, usually ticks or worms, and their resistance is down. It’s when they come out in the daytime that there’s cause for concern, and catching them in a towel and taking them to a wildlife hospital is the best thing to do.

I’m a hedgehog convert. They’re absolutely adorable, and an asset to any garden.

They do have very strong ideas about their furnishings, though. This doormat was meant to deter slugs, but did not meet with approval.