The hedgehog is arguably Britain’s best-loved mammal. Unmistakable in appearance, gentle in nature and a popular character in children’s stories since Beatrix Potter’s Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, it has a special place in our hearts.
Yet our hedgehogs are disappearing as fast as the world’s tigers. This is the alarming conclusion of ten years of work by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES).
We already knew hedgehog numbers were going down. What is new is the frightening scale of the decline. The new data shows that hedgehog numbers fell by 37 per cent between 2003 and 2012, suggesting there are now fewer than a million left in the UK.
That may sound like a lot, yet there were an estimated 36 million as recently as the Fifties. There were still some two million in the mid-Nineties. So this rapid decline should set alarm bells ringing very loudly.
I began to get a sense of it ten years ago when giving lectures to Women’s Institute groups. At nearly every lecture, someone would ask why they were seeing fewer and fewer hedgehogs.
Gardeners would fondly reminisce about resident hedgehogs proving valuable allies in the never-ending war against slugs.
Elderly ladies would recall being woken at dawn by the sound of hedgehogs knocking over the milk bottles to get at the contents.
At first, I ascribed this to nostalgia, just as people always imagine that the summers of their childhood were drier and warmer than they are today.
But no. The good ladies of the WI were correct. The data collected by citizen scientists around the country has revealed the true scale of the problem, and I now rarely have a conversation about hedgehogs that does not centre on their dwindling numbers.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Worrying: Hedgehog numbers have dropped dramatically in the last 60 years
The British Hedgehog Preservation Society, for which I am a spokesman, has joined forces with the PTES to pool resources in an attempt to halt this. The first thing to do was assess just how bad the decline was.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]In the Fifties there were an estimated 36 million hedgehogs. There are now less than a million
Since hedgehogs are nocturnal and often hide away within a hedge, getting a clear idea of the population is difficult. So we have been developing surveys that allow us to monitor changes over time.
One of these, ‘Mammals on Roads’, depends on volunteers counting the number of dead hedgehogs they see on the roads on specific journeys.
Counter-intuitively, the more dead hedgehogs on the roads, the happier scientists are, because it signifies a larger population of hedgehogs in the wild. There is even an iPhone app available to help record the results.
These numbers have been crunched by the experts to produce the scary figure of a 37 per cent decline in ten years. So why is this happening?
The biggest problems faced by hedgehogs are loss of food and habitat and habitat fragmentation.
The first two are easy to understand.
If a green space full of hedgehogs is built upon, the hedgehogs lose their habitat. If agriculture is industrialised, as it has been, the macro-invertebrate fauna (i.e., a hedgehog’s food staples of worms, beetles, slugs and snails) can be reduced by up to 90 per cent.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]The fragmentation of the countryside may be behind the animal's dwindling numbers
But it is habitat fragmentation that gets the experts really worried. This happens when, for example, a green space is cut in two by a road.
Two smaller pockets of hedgehog-friendly habitat are not too bad, you might think. But over the years these have been divided into ever smaller pockets of land, to the point where they are too small to support a population of hedgehogs.
Furthermore, the animals cannot migrate to an area that would sustain them because of the barriers we have erected.
These barriers can be big and obvious. Many busy roads have concrete barriers down the middle, so even if a hedgehog were foolish enough to try to cross, it could get only half-way.
Another problem comes in the form of a large black-and-white competitor. Hedgehogs and badgers eat the same food, such as earthworms and slugs, most of the time.
For many years, they have co-existed. But when the availability of food is reduced, the relationship shifts to a predatory one.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Homeowners are being asked to put small holes in their fences to allow hedgehogs to travel and thrive
Badgers have strong claws that are longer than a hedgehog’s spines, so they can force them open, eating the flesh and leaving behind a shell of spines.
When not eating them, badgers create further problems for hedgehogs by inhibiting their movement as they look for food.
And if the number of hedgehogs is reduced — to accommodate larger fields of rape seed, for example — the competition for food is even more intense, with the bigger animal always likely to be the winner.
So what can be done? I have often been asked why what appeared to be a perfectly hedgehog-friendly, pesticide-free garden — with a compost heap and corners given over to brambles — had no hedgehogs.
But if this perfect garden is surrounded by an inaccessible wall or fence, then there is no way for the creature to get in.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Badgers prey on hedgehogs as their claws are long enough to reach past their spines
That is why a project called the Hedgehog Street has been trying to get neighbours to ensure connectivity between gardens. It can be as simple as building a small hole into the base of the fence.
Why should we care about the demise of just one species? Well, the hedgehog has been around in some form or other since the time of the dinosaurs.
They have outlived sabre-toothed tigers and coped with the cataclysmic changes wrought by Ice Ages.
But the fact is that there is something we are doing to the natural world that is causing their numbers to dwindle, and that should give us pause for thought.
Our hedgehogs could well be acting like canaries in a mine. They may be warning us about something — and we would be foolish to dismiss the message.
But there is another aspect to this debate concerning the future of the hedgehog. The late and influential U.S. biologist Stephen Jay Gould once said: ‘We will not fight to save what we do not love.’
What all the conservation groups try to do is to get us to ‘fall in love’ with the natural world so we will join in the fight for its survival.
But to do this they use what is known as the ‘charismatic mega fauna’ — the lions and tigers, elephants and whales — to try to seduce us.
Now, most of us are as likely to get close to a humpback whale or a Siberian tiger as we are to Angelina Jolie or George Clooney.
We are not going to form meaningful relationships with Hollywood A-listers — more likely it will be the boy or girl next door. And that’s what the humble hedgehog represents.
This occurred to me one evening in 1993 when I was radio-tracking hedgehogs for the RSPCA. I had named them (in contravention of all the scientific principles of objectivity and dispassionate investigation). And my favourite was Nigel.
We came nose to nose in the pre-dawn light on a Devon lane, and I realised then that there is no other wild animal that you can safely do this with.
Nigel looked into my eyes, I gazed into his and, yes, I fell a little in love. I hope you can, too.
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Tue Feb 05, 2013 10:59 am