ONE night, many summers ago, my children went through one of those rites of passage that I think happen to most children. They were going to spend their first night camping out alone — two brothers aged seven and eight.
The adventure required a lot of preparation. The tent was erected on the lawn, about three metres from the front door and then stocked with survival gear — sleeping bags, toy guns, flashlights and quite an amazing quantity of drinks, bars and biscuits. Eventually it started to get dark and the younger one asked casually if I’d mind leaving the front door open — in case they’d forgotten anything. Then the questions started.
"Dad, are there any wolves in Ireland?"
"No, the last one was killed more than 250 years ago."
"Dad, what about snakes?"
"No, no snakes."
"Dad, what other dangerous animals live in Ireland?"
A conversation about Irish carnivores and the fact that they pose no danger to human life went on for some time but slowly petered out into silence.
About half-an-hour later, the silence was punctured by a high-pitched shriek from outside the front door.
"Dad, Dad, come quickly. We’re being attacked by a badger!"
I did what any parent would do. I grabbed a large flashlight and the fireside poker and went out to protect my precious offspring from the marauding badger. What I discovered was a little different.
A hedgehog, attracted no doubt by the over-powering smell of chocolate and biscuits, was trying to climb into the front of the tent.
Misidentifying wild mammals in the dark is excusable if you’re only seven and a little bit nervous.
The camping adventure was abandoned and the boys spent the rest of the night indoors in their regular beds. But I was reminded of the event the other day when I was giving a seminar on gardening for wildlife and a lady told me that she had a hedgehog in her garden and that she wanted to know how she could keep it there.
Unfortunately the answer is "with very great difficulty". Hedgehogs, like shrews, are insectivores and these animals forage. They ramble around in a fairly aimless manner encountering food items as they go. Hedgehogs mainly do this at night, while shrews do it 24 hours a day.
The average hedgehog walks about three kilometres every night while it’s foraging. It’s extremely unlikely to do this by walking round in circles within the confines of one garden.
However, there are some things you can do to make a garden an attractive place for a hedgehog to visit in the course of its nightly ramble. The obvious one is to leave out food. Traditionally, this was bread soaked in milk, but apparently this is not very good for a hedgehog’s digestive system. Tinned cat food is said to be much better, but if there are cats around as well, you may have problems.
They also sleep during the day and hibernate all winter. An animal will normally have several daytime nests to choose from, picking the one that is nearest to the spot its rambles have brought it to at dawn. If you can leave a pile of brushwood in a quiet corner of the garden, a hedgehog may well crawl into the middle of it, pulling moss and dried grass with it, and construct a nest.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, August 25, 2008
