Wildlife in West Cork: blink and you miss it

I arrive back from the Canary Islands, with a brief stop-over in London, and have messages on my telephone which make me wonder if there is more exotic wildlife to be seen in West Cork than in many far-flung places.

Firstly, there was the hedgehog family. While hedgehogs aren’t rare, the ‘exotic’ element is in the eye of the beholder. I would count the sight of six baby hedgehogs, pink and with tiny spines on their backs, as exotic, the more so as the mother remained calm, did not cover them with her body, and received the interest of humans with apparent equanimity.

When a farmer found this hodgepodge of hedgehogs nestled in a straw-lined hollow in an outhouse in his yard in Kilbrittain, Co Cork, he kindly telephoned me, knowing I’d be intrigued. I wasn’t at home that day and the next, so he left messages. Meanwhile, he and his son, Oliver O’Brien, put some straw bales around the nest to protect it. The mother (the sow) seemed totally unalarmed by the attentions given to her and her offspring.