Quiet, discreet and dignified, the hedgehog embodies a gentle Englishness. But now it is mysteriously disappearing from our parks, hedgerows and lanes. Why? Adam Nicolson investigates
These are sad and bad days for the hedgehog. Nobody knows, for sure, very much about them - how many there are, where they are, how many are needed for a viable population, how they cope with modern life, or, in a country teeming with foxes and badgers, their natural predators. But one thing now is certain: the hedgehogs of Britain are dying out at a rate of about a fifth of the population every four years. By 2025, they will be gone.
Hedgehogs have already largely disappeared from central London. Only half of the places in the capital where they were recorded in the mid-60s now have them. Of all the London parks, only Regent's Park still has any living in it. In a broad sweep of country stretching up the eastern side of England from Kent to Northumbria, hedgehogs are in what Dr Paul Bright, lecturer in ecology at Royal Holloway, University of London, calls "a nosedive".
Stories of hedgehog decline have been around for years, but only now is Bright completing the first statistically robust report on the drop in numbers. Commissioned by the government's Joint Nature Conservation Committee and the People's Trust for Endangered Species, a private charity, his report will highlight what he calls "a serious rate of decline, what amounts to a red alert for hedgehogs". When he delivers his conclusions to the authorities later this month, they will send shockwaves through the conservation establishment. Or they should.
The census method is paradoxical: go for a drive of at least 20 miles; count the number of dead hedgehogs; and what you have, in effect, is not a measure of how many hedgehogs have been killed by cars but how many hedgehogs there are for cars to kill. The more dead hedgehogs on the roads, the better the health of the hedgehog population. For the past four years, Bright has coordinated reports of many thousands of drivers who have been looking out for squashed hedgehogs. Over those four years, the numbers reported per mile has dropped at an average of 5% a year. Comparing his censuses with other surveys done in the 1990s, Bright reckons that the overall drop in numbers is something like 50% in 15 years.
Initially, there were doubts about the method. What about the growth in the number of roads, or in the number of cars on those roads? Any results would be fatally skewed by those other variables. But with four years' worth of figures, those wrinkles can now be ironed out and Bright can say unequivocally that "the data is robust, it shows little variability in trend and that trend is strongly suggestive of a long-term decline. Hedgehog numbers, in an animal which is widespread and ought to be common, are not what they were."
By multiplying the number of hedgehogs he had counted on a golf course, Dr Pat Morris, the grandfather of all hedgehog scientists, reckoned that the British hedgehog population in the mid-90s was, very roughly, about two million. Today, that figure might be down to a million. As nobody has any idea of the population dynamics once the overall numbers are so radically depleted, there is no telling what will happen next. And apart from Bright's work, almost nothing is being done to find out. According to Dr Nigel Reeve, community ecologist for the royal parks, who has devoted many professional years to hedgehogs, "There is simply no government interest in them. Even Paul Bright had to get a private charity to fund half his work. We need a good census nationally. We need to know where they are. A common animal needs to be protected before it becomes an uncommon animal. But there is no support for this. Out of sight, out of mind. People say they love a hedgehog, but you try getting real funding for any hedgehog research. You would find it very, very difficult. Most people couldn't give a monkey's. I have to admit I am slightly despairing about it."
Does it matter? Of course it matters. The loss of the hedgehog would be more than just the loss of a small, prickly Mrs Tiggywinkle. Unlike any other animal in this country - except, perhaps, the mole, whose condition is, if anything, even more opaque, and just as likely to be following its own chute to oblivion - the hedgehog has always been a symbol and embodiment of something subtle and tender in the landscape. It is not a flamboyant showman of a creature, but quiet, nocturnal and discreet. Even though it has a great sense of smell - it can sniff a dog 35ft away - and can jump two feet to catch a beetle, and that a Russian hedgehog once found its way back home after it had been dropped 48 miles away across the tundra, the hedgehog is not, on the whole, a very clever creature. It has a very small brain and very conservative habits. It is no fox. One owner tried to teach his hedgehog a simple lesson - open the red door for lunch - 4,000 times. It looked the other way.
Because its spines are remarkably strong and elastic, and will cushion any fall, hedgehogs are perfectly happy to fall into cattle grids, pits and cellars because they bounce on landing. They don't think about how to get out afterwards. They doze in long summer grass where strimmers chop them up. They get tangled up in tennis nets. They die inside expanded polystyrene cups. The hedgehog smells something delicious left in the bottom of the cup, pushes its snout in to lick up the remains and then finds the cup stuck to its prickles. Many have been found dead with yoghurt pots and ice-cream containers clamped to their faces.
The hedgehog, in other words, is not a modern beast. It seems to inhabit something of the underside of life, its existence largely hidden, its dignity silently preserved. It is an animal often persecuted (and eaten) but that has always appealed to those not attracted to the flash or cleverness of life. John Byrom, a lazy, self-indulgent 18th-century versifier, had three black hedgehogs on his coat of arms. "A foe to none, but everybody's friend," he wrote in tribute to them, "And loth, although offended, to offend." It was inevitable that John Clare would identify with the hedgehog who "hides beneath the rotten hedge", a creature hunted, in his innocence, by the brutality of the farmers who imagined that hedgehogs drank their cows' milk dry. Clare knew this to be a lie,
But still they hunt the hedges all about
And shepherd dogs are trained to hunt them
out
They hurl with savage force the stick and
stone
And no one cares and still the strife goes on
They have been protected from hunting since 1981, although not, bizarrely, from torture when alive, which is easily done if you are that way inclined, as they are so easy to catch. But they are dying now in a subtler and more secret way. The prospect of their loss seems dreadful, partly, I think, because the hedgehog can be seen as the soul of England, or at least of a version of England, a version which is too valuable to be lost. It is the England involved in self-absorbed snuffling through the landscape, which spends almost the entire winter asleep, only waking now and then to shift its nest or remake the present one, which rolls up into a self-protective ball when threatened, which is neither very dynamic nor sharp but which is redolent of an ancient dignity.
All of that understanding is what lies behind Philip Larkin's famous poem about a terrible moment of destruction in June 1979, when pushing his mower, a Qualcast Commodore, around his Hull garden:
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably.
This deep and all-present unobtrusiveness of the hedgehog is not purely literary or sentimental: a kind of patient unobtrusiveness is its central characteristic. What the biologists call the hedgehog's "generalism", its lack of slick speciality, the way it noses for beetles, caterpillars, earwigs and worms, sometimes eating frogs, baby mice, eggs and chicks, its happy existence at the bottom of hedges and in people's back gardens, its inability to cope with very large, chemically denuded arable fields - in other words its fondness for the private, the scruffy and the marginal - all make it a measure of the state of the landscape's health as a whole. As Bright says, "It is a good indicator for a range of generalists. And if a place isn't good for hedgehogs, it isn't good for anything else."
This, in a way, is what Larkin's poem is about: the smashing invasion of the Qualcast Commodore destroys the world of the hedgehog, which is a destruction of the world of unobtrusiveness. Larkin never used the mower again.
It is a widely treasured creature. The British Hedgehog Preservation Society has more than 600 "carers" on its list, the stars of which are probably Ken and Sue Lewis of Rochdale, who take in up to 2,000 injured, poisoned, orphaned or burned hedgehogs a year (157 there this week). Why? "I suppose because they have adorable faces," Mrs Lewis says. Fay Vass, chief executive of the BHPS, thinks: 'He's just a useful chap to have around. And if what we are doing is damaging hedgehogs, people need to buckle down and start to think of other animals apart from ourselves." Only in England would the conservation of wild mammals be discussed in these terms, but "a useful chap to have around" sounds strangely like what a hedgehog's rather modest description of itself might be.
The decline of the hedgehog is steepest in the east of the country, but it is a national phenomenon. Scottish Natural Heritage is exterminating them in the Outer Hebrides not because there is a plague of hedgehogs there but to protect the nests of the wading birds whose eggs and chicks a few escaped pet hedgehogs having been eating. But the causes of the general and national decline remain largely a matter of guesswork. The basic facts on which to make any judgments are not there. Bright guesses that the removal of hedges has removed the hedgehogs' foraging habitat. "Hedgehogs are an edge-loving species and it is perfectly obvious that if you remove a lot of hedges to make bigger fields, then the hedgehog has got a lot more walking to do to get his food."
Bright is planning to do some comparative research this summer on the different densities of hedgehog populations in small-field and big-field landscapes. There is a problem with this theory in that the hedgehogs are in decline now but the great orgy of hedge removal occurred up to 30 years ago. "We are still a very long way from isolating causes for the decline," Bright says. He suggests the use of chemicals on arable fields has probably killed most of the insect prey - "the biomass has simply been removed" - and perhaps had a deleterious effect on the hedgehog's own metabolism.
Hedgehogs appear to do better in suburban gardens - "a more heterogeneous landscape," as Bright says - than in the countryside, maybe because modern suburban gardens are more like ancient countryside than the modern countryside is. It is perfectly possible to think, as far as the hedgehog is concerned, the more housing estates built on arable fields the better. John Prescott is the hedgehog's friend. And there are the new agri-environment schemes that encourage landowners to put in new hedges and to leave unploughed "headlands" around the arable fields. But they have yet to make much headway into the chemically farmed acreages. The question for the rural hedgehogs is whether those changes will come soon enough.
In the towns, it is scarcely better. Concreting over front gardens won't have helped. Nor will garden make-overs as a whole have been hedgehog-friendly. The policy of building on brownfield sites, and the general increase in the busyness of urban lives, has probably removed a great deal of hedgehog habitat and cut up what remains into small pieces that may not be enough to sustain a hedgehog population. Nigel Reeve says 'It is all a story of tidying up, fragmentation and poor connectivity. Hedgehogs love the interstices in cities, the rough brambly places, where they can hide up in the day time or in winter. We need to defragment the cities for these animals, leave more of the mess for them." But Reeve is quite candid: much of what he says is little more than a guess, as the size of linked acreage needed for a viable hedgehog population is not known.
This is, straightforwardly, a question of knowledge. The hedgehogs are dying because we don't know what we are doing to them. Without that knowledge, quite silently, an unobtrusive world is being mauled and, because it is largely invisible, nothing much is being said about it. Unless that knowledge is acquired - and acted on - the hedgehog, in our lifetimes, will end up as little more than a memory.
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Wed Nov 07, 2012 9:53 am
