A hedgehog with fifteen babies!
In late July 1997, a lady told me she had been clearing shrubbery in the garden and disturbed a hedgehog in its nest. The following evening, a second, much bigger hedgehog was seen in the same place, making a lot of noise. The next morning, the smaller female spent 2 hours making 14 journeys from the nest to another site, each time carrying a baby hedgehog, and a fifteenth baby was later found in the nest, dead.
It was assumed that the family had numbered 15 and the second hedgehog was the male coming to assist at a time of need. In fact, litters of more than 8 or 9 are exceedingly rare, and 15 has never been reported before. Moreover, males take no part in rearing their offspring. What seems more likely is that both these adults were females and somehow their litters had become combined. Aggregating young into creches is known for some other species (including the dormouse), but I recall only one report for the hedgehog. This was in 1958 when a nest on the Isle of Wight containing six babies of tow clearly different size categories. The explanation offered then was a form of superimposed pregnancy, but this is unlikely.
Perhaps the lady had actually disturbed two nests during the shrub clearance and the noise next day was the second female moving her young into a nest which was already occupied by the first hedgehog and her family (hedgehogs will use each other's nests, although usually only when they are empty). Maybe this caused the first hedgehog, dismayed by all this disturbance from people and another hedgehog, to move the entire collection of young. The problem then would be to rear any of them, as female hedgehogs often have difficulty raising even 6 young, never mind 14.
This story has been taken from The New Hedgehog Book by Pat Morris.
Fri Aug 03, 2012 12:00 pm
