Another Life: Fond of casual sex, even fonder of sleep. Meet the hedgehog

Autumn, falling leaves and hedgehogs seem to go together, even as that engaging little mammal prepares to disappear for the winter. Last October I told of the farming friend and neighbour exasperated by a volley of barking from his yard, night after night, at 1am or 2am. His kennelled dog was protesting yet again at the intrusion of a hedgehog, licking the last crumbs from the food bowl within inches of his nose. My neighbour would take a long-handled shovel, scoop the curled-up hedgehog from beneath the dog’s paw and lob it gently back into the dark. “You’d think it would learn,” he said.

But apparently not. The other night, while we slept, the shovel was borne through our gate to tip a ball of prickles into our ample undergrowth. We had spoken regretfully of the seeming lack of hedgehogs on our acre, and this relocation was a neighbourly gift, confirmed in a phone call next morning.

It sent me out to scan the long autumn grass of the lawn, hopeful of zigzag tracks in the dew and perhaps the odd little dropping, ragged and shiny, to confirm a night's hunting by Erinaceus europaeus. Confused, eventually, by my own welly prints, I gave up. Perhaps, uncurling, the animal had taken another course into our jungle, or perhaps I had reckoned without philopatry and it had simply trundled back home down the hill. By this time, indeed, it should be patching up the gaps in its leafy hibernaculum and preparing to retire by November.

Philopatry (an organism's loyalty to place), hibernaculum . . . I've been spending time with the doctoral thesis of Amy Haigh of University College Cork, now browsable online in Cora, the Cork Open Research Archive. This first deep study of the European hedgehog in rural Ireland is an impressive piece of work, ranging from genetics and habitat choice through sex and family lives to the maximum running speed (30-40m per minute) and road mortality (898 killed so far this year, according to biology.ie).

Genetics mattered, as hedgehogs were an introduction to Ireland, first recorded in Waterford in the 13th century. Compared with French or British hedgehogs they now show little genetic variability, hinting at possible descent from just a few animals brought in by a Norman settler with a longing for hérisson en croute (entirely my conjecture).

Dr Haigh had first to find and radio-tag her rural hedgehogs, meeting problems that were to yield a spin-off paper for the Journal of Negative Results. Failing to make progress with infrared cameras, rabbit traps or footprint boards, she had most success from searches after dusk, four nights a week, with a two-million-candlepower spotlight. The males among the 24 animals radio-tagged in the Cork countryside travelled surprisingly widely over the year – across some 54 hectares – and their roaming for casual sex in spring leads to peak deaths on the roads.

Ireland’s generally mild winters let our hedgehogs hibernate more briefly, averaging 149 days of just ticking over under the leaves, compared with the 210 days they might need in, say, Sweden. This keeps up their weight and makes them less likely to die, even as late-born and featherweight juveniles.

The animals’ choice of habitat at various times is also distinctive, although Cork’s mosaic of arable and pastoral farmland is far from typical of the whole island. At this time of year Haigh’s hedgehogs were found right out to the middle of big stubble fields, teeming with slugs and beetles. When food was so plentiful both badgers and hedgehogs, often predators and prey elsewhere, could coexist in the landscape.

Most Irish hedges still have a lush bramble understory, a ground cover quite missing from the closely barbered European farmland. This, Haigh stresses, is key to hedgehog welfare, supplying not only shelter and leaves for hibernation but also important reserves of insect and mollusc prey.

The wilder side of Dublin

Neither hedgehogs nor badgers appear in the brilliant

Doorstep Wilderness

:

A

Wilder

Side of Dublin

(Collins Press, €24.99), but the dramatic gallery of wildlife photographed by

Paul Hughes

along the city reaches of the Dodder is still quite amazing. Urban foxes, of course, never so beautifully sunlit and groomed; the heron, yes, but rarely so lethally caught at the kill. Otters, squirrels, ducks, cormorant, sparrowhawk, wagtail: the things that go on, under the bridge, just over the wall, are endlessly surprising.

For every rapturous or murderous moment, beginning at dawn in every season, Paul Hughes was there with a beanbag for his camera and the right choice of lens, equipped for the perfect digital capture of movement and light. It’s a book to inspire – but I have to hope, for the sake of the Dodder’s wild community, not too many paparazzi at once. The new life of the Dodder, once a dumping ground for supermarket trolleys and other vile detritus, is a tribute to community and civic concern, and to the resilience of nature.