A famously prickly attitude?

Richard Collins says a new book dispels some myths about hedgehogs.

ISAIAH BERLIN claimed that writers and thinkers are either foxes or hedgehogs. Foxes, such as Shakespeare and Joyce, have many ideas. Hedgehogs, like Plato and Aristotle, have only one, but it’s big. The hedgehog’s big idea is to put safety first. As with humans, fear makes the hair stand on a hog’s head — about 7,000 spines, modified hairs, bristle upwards. The armoured skin is pulled, like a sleeping bag, over the vulnerable parts of the animal’s body. Even new-born hedgehogs have spines. When threatened, a youngster may jump suddenly, giving an inquisitive dog a painful prod.

In A Prickly Affair, My Life with Hedgehogs, Hugh Warwick dispels some of the myths about our armoured friends. It’s not true, for example, that hedgehogs are slow. They are good climbers, travel several kilometres each night, and can move fast when it is needed. Nor do hedgehogs have more fleas than other mammals; the shimmering effect of light on the spines can give the impression of infestation.

Hibernating hedgehogs don’t sleep all the time. Like humans, they rise to drink or urinate and most nests are moved at least once during the winter. Nor is hibernation essential to the hedgehog. In 1861, homesick Europeans brought hedgehogs to New Zealand. The aliens took to the place, and, for better or worse, hogs have become part of the New Zealand fauna. The climate, in that part of the world, is milder than Western Europe’s. Food is available in all seasons and hogs no longer hibernate. In Europe, slugs and beetles become so scarce that hedgehogs are forced to take to their beds.

Warwick was a zoology student when reports appeared in the newspapers of a hog population explosion on a Scottish island. In 1972, an islander brought two hedgehogs to North Ronaldsay, in the Orkneys, hoping to control the slugs in his garden. The pair were enthusiastic breeders and soon the place was overrun with their descendants, the newspapers claimed. North Ronaldsay has important Arctic tern breeding colonies, and, as soon as hedgehogs arrived, the numbers of tern chicks began to decline. The birds nest on the ground; their eggs and young are easy prey to hogs. Terns attack intruders fiercely, even drawing blood, but such tactics don’t work with an animal covered in armour.

Warwick travelled to North Ronaldsay to investigate. He caught as many hedgehogs as he could, marking them with paint so that he would subsequently recognise each individual. One newspaper claimed that there were up to 10,000 hedgehogs on the island, but Warwick encountered only 138. He estimated the total to be four to six hundred, still large enough to seriously damage the tern population. When a hedgehog extermination campaign got under way, with the blessing of Scottish Natural Heritage, animal welfare enthusiasts were up in arms. They began capturing hogs and sending them for adoption to the mainland.

Then, Warwick turned this attention to the terns. It seemed that the adults were bringing too few fish to their chicks and that those being delivered were smaller than usual.

Food shortages rather than raids by hedgehogs, he argued, caused the nesting failure. North Ronaldsay was the first island to be invaded by hedgehogs, but, in 2003, a similar problem arose in the Uists. Conservationists were virtually unanimous in blaming hedgehogs for the seabird breeding failures, but Warwick, ever loyal to his favourite animal, does not agree. He has a low opinion of ornithologists, but his unashamedly biased history of the island hedgehog wars is lively and entertaining.

Warwick’s account of eccentric hedgehog devotees is equally amusing. Back garden hedgehog ‘hospitals’ are flourishing throughout Britain. There is even a ‘Hogsford Charity Shop’. One of his more colourful anecdotes concerns a Serbian who ‘needed emergency surgery after he tried to have sex with a hedgehog on the advice of a witchdoctor who claimed it would cure premature ejaculation.’

In 1900, Father Hugh, of the Catholic mission in Hankow, China sent a specimen to the British Museum; Hugh’s hedgehog is the rarest of the 14 species known. It has been recorded on only a dozen occasions.

* A Prickly Affair, my life with hedgehogs by Hugh Warwick is published by Allen Lane, price £14.99.