Authors Electric

  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 Hedgeho...

I have frequently plundered my wildlife observations for characters. From The Wind in the Willows to Watership Down , it’s been a staple fare for so many authors as it’s direct observation that informs the writing, rather than second-hand information. That’s the way that errors creep in. Many years ago I was illustrating a natural history book, and one of the items required was a swordfish. Like most people, I imagine, I assumed a swordfish was black on top, and silver beneath. Random house, the publisher, sent me a lot of information from the National Institute of Oceanography at Southampton, and to my surprise I discovered they were copper-coloured. The first books to illustrate fish were printed in black and white, and what happened subsequently was that illustrators relied on these pictures, made assumptions based on other big fish like tuna, and got it wrong. (Actually, even tuna have a yellowish stripe down the side.)           ...