The bonfire is going out of fashion - except in the North, that is, specifically on July 11th and on whatever day they burn Lundy in Derry, if they still do in these transition days. In suburban gardens down here, you hardly ever get that delicious smell of woodsmoke from burning leaves. Probably there is a law against it, though most gardeners have learned the value of turning their clippings or cuttings into compost. Anyway, the same seems not to hold in Britain; for a letter to the Field asks its readers to make a careful last-minute check of their autumn bonfires for, to the hedgehog, piles of leaves are the very thing for their winter sleep. And every year, claims the letter, many of them meet a painful death by fire. Readers are asked to check before igniting the pile. "Hedgehogs are the gardeners friend," goes the letter, "please look after them."
Well, we know they eat slugs and snails, and take it for granted that they are in no way destructive. There is a British Hedgehog Preservation Society in Shropshire. To many people the hedgehog is the flattened mass you see on roads, mostly motorways, and not so often alive and ambling around your garden at a rate which has been calculated as averaging three metres a minute and, as someone said "a top speed only a tortoise could appreciate." Others interpret this top speed as perhaps 30 to 40 metres per minute. Not bad.
In spite of their having some 6,000 to 7,000 prickles, there are predators who can overcome them and eat them - badgers, apparently, the foxes, and pine martens. Mind you, they climb well and swim well. They have, according to the books - never come across it - a behaviour known as self-anointing. The team which gave us the tortoise comparison believes they do it - flicking gobs of foamy saliva over its own spines - when stimulated by a novel scent, and this is illustrated by a photograph of a hedgehog face to face with a toad (Natural History Magazine, July/ August, 1998. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Hedgehog" by Chris Reiter and Gina C Gould.)
The animal is mostly nocturnal. Hence Thomas Hardy: Some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm/When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn. And symbol of single-mindedness. Isiah Berlin refers to Dante, Plato and Hegel as hedgehogs for their devotion to "one big thing".