Merlin has a prickly question for Moray
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By Moray wildlife correspondent Merlin
One night in December last year I heard a rustling noise among leaves inside a shrub outside my front door.
Wondering what it was I went back inside for a torch and was delighted to see that a hedgehog had come to visit.
I was a bit surprised to see it as hedgehogs are usually hibernating by December but judging by its size it was not fully grown and young animals tend to hibernate later than adults.
It was a welcome visitor because it is likely to eat slugs and other beasties that are harmful to plants in my garden. A few nights later I saw it toddling along a nearby lane and disappearing into another garden so it is obviously staying in the area.
They obviously breed in the area as well because a few years ago during the summer I found two half grown young in the near neighbourhood.
I handed one to the SSPCA because I was concerned it would get run down on a nearby busy road. My younger grandchildren came to see it when I had it in my possession and were delighted by it.
It is a bit of a miracle that hedgehogs can survive in urban areas because as well as the dangers of traffic they also have to negotiate a lot of obstacles in their path such as fences and walls as they move around the concrete jungle searching for food.
Hedgehogs appear to be a lot scarcer out in the countryside than they once were because I seldom see them nowadays.
During the 1970s I owned a labrador dog that used to surprisingly hunt and retrieve hedgehogs when out walking with me in the woods. The first time it happened I was walking through a pinewood and felt a stabbing feeling in the back of my legs and looked round to see my labrador with a hedgehog in his mouth.
Even though his mouth and tongue was bleeding he was reluctant to let it go and I had to make him sit while I took the hedgehog several hundred metres away to set it free unharmed.
This used to happen quite regularly and it took me a while to stop him retrieving hedgehogs. After that if he found one he would just bark at it to let me know what he had found.
Perhaps, because I am not frequenting woodland so often nowadays and do not own a hedgehog retrieving labrador I may have formed a false impression that hedgehogs are scarcer than they used to be locally. However, studies have shown that there has been a huge decline in hedgehog numbers. During the 1950s it was estimated that the population in the UK was 50 million.
By 1995 the population was estimated to be only about 1.5 million (1.1 million in England; 0.31 million in Scotland and 0.145 million in Wales). Researchers in recent times have suggested the population has continued to decline.
There are thought to be several reasons behind the decline including intensification of agriculture, increased traffic on the roads (it is estimated that 100,000 hedgehogs are killed annually on Britain’s roads) and predation by an increasing population of badgers.
n There will be more to come on hedgehogs in another article.
