Sun baked; desiccated husks hung on the fence amid a dwindling vulpine aroma. Their eyes had long gone, and the spark vanished, leaving empty sockets where maggots had done their work, hatching into flies nurtured on the flesh of the dead, the remains of wild creatures – corvids, foxes, badgers, a polecat and numerous stoats and weasels. There were also hedgehogs; until 1981, they had no legal protection. Thousands would have been found on similar gruesome gamekeeper’s gibbets countrywide, killed for their penchant for eating the eggs of ground-nesting birds. Mainly non-native, introduced game birds. Pheasants. The Victorian culling legacy and its hideous practices lingered long. I look back to the many gibbets I remember, cap-doffing exercises boasting of the life that had been taken. Killing for killing’s sake, and largely supposedly to protect other species that would eventually die at the hand of humans too – for sport.
As a child, I grew used to seeing dead animals. My first encounter with death was with a badger cub my mother rescued from men with terriers. It lasted less than a week and then succumbed. I would have been around five at the time, but I can still feel that pain, that inconsolable sadness. I frequently experience it when faced with similar situations with the casualties I am brought or the wildlife crimes I hear about. The suffering of animals makes me suffer, too, and keeps me awake at night, fretting into the small hours about the mess we are making, the effects of rising temperatures and the severity of increasingly frequent storms. However, if you love and care for animals as deeply as I do, you must prepare for their inevitable departures. Nothing lives forever. I like to think that, working closely with wildlife, I have a balanced view of death, and that I know when animals are not going to recover sufficiently to return to where they belong, and instead, will loiter in the departure lounge. We are lucky that we can make the decisions.
During my early teens, I spent school holidays with gamekeepers, shepherds and stalkers. There is an irony to the fact that these old-school country people have an unsurpassed knowledge of wildlife. Yet, I also grew used to their indiscriminate culling – black-backed gulls, hooded crows, ravens and birds of prey, foxes and numerous mustelids. Snares filled me with horror, no living thing deserves such a fate. I felt relieved when my companions pulled the trigger to terminate the suffering, but it never became less emotionally painful. I remember, too, a pine marten brought into the public bar of my parent’s hotel in Ardnamurchan at the end of the 1960s. No one had a definitive identification for the beautiful beast with its luxuriant cocoa-coloured fur, duster-yellow bib, face more pointed than a pretty cat, and impressive sharp predator teeth, revealed in a death grimace. Though we frequently saw wildcats in Ardnamurchan during that era, pine martens had long gone, persecuted to the brink. The pine marten has returned to the peninsula’s magnificent wind-sculpted Atlantic oakwoods. The wildcat has gone.
There is no gentle way to ease into my feelings regarding the hedgehogs’ continuing decline. In 2020, they were put on the IUCN Red List as vulnerable to extinction in Great Britain. Would I be doing you any favours to wrap up my words carefully to protect you from my deep sadness? Solastalgia – a neologism that perfectly describes the feelings associated with the distress of environmental change connected to the home environment – you could use it to convey your emotions when a tree you have known and loved is brutally felled, development on a beautiful wild site, or the loss of a previously frequently seen species. I suffer from solastalgia more and more. Sometimes, I tiptoe gently around issues, ameliorating my words to retain positivity. Sometimes, I don’t think we have hope, but I maintain the pretence.
It is indeed a well-known fact that hedgehogs are in decline. The reasons are many. Scientific experts will say it’s complex: intensive farming, chemical sprays, habitat loss, etc. Others will immediately claim that the decline is because ‘there are too many badgers.’ To the latter, I ask how two ancient mammals have survived alongside one another to this point. Why should badgers now be the sole reason for the massive crash in hedgehog numbers? Some things in life are predictable, I can hear the response: ‘We used to keep badger numbers under control. There are far too many badgers.’ The response I would like to give is that there are far too many humans. The rise in road networks and traffic further threatens the survival of both species.
Like the hedgehog, the badger is now legally protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 and the Protection of Badgers Act of 1992, which includes protection of their setts. In some places where there have never been badgers, hedgehogs are also in decline. Consider that some 40 million non-native gamebirds are set loose into the natural environment. These unfortunate birds compete for the same dwindling food source despite some game managers putting out grain and planting game crops. Like badgers and hedgehogs, pheasants are omnivores, but they feed by day. Invertebrates, amphibians, and small reptiles, including young adders and slowworms, feature high on their menu. With the continuing and blatantly noticeable crash in insect numbers this year, there can be nothing remaining as hedgehogs and badgers start to forage in the gloaming. Could the increase in the number of pheasant releases over recent decades correlate with the documented decline of hedgehogs over the same time frame?
Some badgers consume hedgehogs. When two species compete for the same sustenance, the larger, more powerful animal may feed on the smaller, vulnerable one—intraguild predation is common in nature. It can be symmetrical, where both species could prey on one another, or asymmetrical, where the stronger prey on the weaker.
Habitat restoration can maintain the natural balance between badgers and hedgehogs. As their name suggests, hedgehogs need hedgerows. Protecting and planting hedges is critical, as they provide safe corridors for movement and an environment for invertebrates. These lifelines are necessary for hedgehogs to avoid encountering badgers out in the open, disrupting their natural dynamic and jeopardising them.
Humans are fickle; having survived the Victorian gamekeeper’s gibbet, hedgehogs are the subject of our boundless adoration. However, they now face their most significant hurdle yet—climate change. I have been taking in injured and orphaned hedgehogs since my youth. Early wildlife diaries burgeon with entries; indeed, most of the hoglets I painstakingly reared went on to successful release. If anything, over the years, I should have gleaned more knowledge to improve techniques for hand-rearing and care, having worked closely with other experienced rehabilitators. I should have better results, not worse. Not only do I now receive fewer hedgehogs, but the ones that come in are frequently so painfully thin and far down that I cannot bring them back from the cliff edge, and over they go. We spend more time digging holes than releasing our charges. Of note is the number of hedgehogs that appear during winter – this seldom happened before. Most do not make it. Temperatures fluctuate wildly, swinging from below zero to the high teens – even in winter, and within hours. In January 2024, Kinlochewe, hit a record 19.6 degrees C making it hotter than Rome. How can so small a body that falls into a deep sleep state with a lowered heart rate cope with these crazy climatic catastrophes? As far as I can tell, it can’t.
Summer heatwaves will result in sick hedgehogs. Starvation kills. At other times, I can find nothing wrong with the hedgehogs people bring. I have always understood that hedgehogs have primitive brains, but if you ask me, I think they are depressed and giving in to environmental stress.
As I write, two baby hedgehogs, victims of a roadside grass-cutting machine, are making steady progress. I will release them before the autumn on a beautiful farm far from roads, where habitat restoration work is reaping results. It was one of the few places where I witnessed healthy invertebrate numbers this summer.
Hedgehogs enchant us – little altered over thousands of years, they are ancient mammals that seem trusting. They don’t run away and instead curl into a tight ball, allowing us to study their eccentric forms, Spanish chestnuts in their brown prickly cases. Nun-like, under hedgehogs’ habits of prickles and pelmets of coarse hair, they have surprisingly long legs. A unique family all of their own, hedgehogs have had little need to change since their arrival around 1.5 million years ago. Their primitive prototype was perfect until now. The world is changing fast. We need action, for there is no more time.
Polly Pullar
Polly Pullar is a naturalist, wildlife writer and photographer with monthly features in several magazines and is author of ten books, including Fauna Scotica, Animals & People in Scotland; A Scurry of Squirrels – Nurturing the Wild; & The Horizontal Oak – A Life in Nature. She rehabilitates wildlife and specialises in red squirrels, raptors and owls. Polly is co-founder of A Write Highland Hoolie–Mallaig Book Festival.