UNKNOWN BELOW

HEDGEHOGS AT DUSK

It's been a long time.

It's been many summers. Too many summer nights snufflefree and still.

But they're back! First an oval of shadow on the lawn. Then a shuffle, a ripple of spikiness along the flower borders.

I know they are a pair. One night at the start of the current heatwave, I met the first one on the lawn where it had crept close to observe me as I leaned, steadying my camera against a tree trunk, trying to capture Jupiter's string of moons in the southwestern sky. The other was waiting for me on the patio, smaller, with mischievous eyes. The second one was less interested in a peculiar human stargazing, more in gazing at the goodies the departing birds had left unpecked for the creatures of the night.

Hedgehog numbers are declining on these islands. They are now a rare sight in British gardens. Fewer than a million remain, down from nearer thirty million when I was born at the dawn of the Sixties. A third of that catastrophic loss has been just in this past decade. These little souls are survivors of this long slow bereavement of the English countryside. I feel unutterably blessed.

Once the birds have flown off and the heat of the day has decanted itself down the thermometer into the soft melt of dusk, I wait to lionise them with dried mealworms, crushed sunflower hearts and peanuts. I top up the bird and bee baths as the sun dissolves into pastel glad-rags of coral and titian on the western horizon. Someone else has need of the nocturnal libation.

I wait. I wait, holding my breath to catch the rustle of their coming. Footfalls across the lawns, threading through hedges, triggering security lights, trembling the dreaming heads of daisies.

Then they're here! Noses badged with leaf litter, eyes more accustomed than my own to the gloaming. Above us, bats skip and soar under the trees and out into the crepuscular backcloth of cloudless sky, tiny Pipistrelles skittering through twilight. Their nationwide numbers too are in steep decline. The hedgepiggies and I, below, must celebrate and survive today and hope for tomorrow.

Before my head hits the fridge-cooled pillowcase, they have melted back into the sweltering South Yorkshire nightfall, making unspoken promises to lighten my life again tomorrow night, and the next, promises I hope against hope they will be cherished enough by humankind to be able to keep.

Baby hedgehog's mealworm munchtime

Nom nom nom! Must admit, the dried mealworms I put out for the birds do smell surprisingly appetising! I scatter them on the raised pebbled border just outside my back door.

The yummy smell comes as a bit of a surprise, actually. It's in direct contrast to the infernal stench of the "Maggot Factory" at the end of my lane when I was growing up, where maggots were bred for the fishing and angling trade. The horrific stink that wafted over the fields to my house at the edge of the village was truly gut-wrenching on hot summer evenings!


But these days, I didn't realised these little dried buddies' aroma would attract the baby hedgehog so close to the house. This delightful close enclounter happened yesterday lunchtime. I saw the little hedgehog toddling along towards me over the concrete patio. As I went out with my mobile phone to capture him on camera, keeping downwind so he wouldn't ball himself up in fright, he clambered up onto the mealworm-scattered pebbly "bird table."

There his little face took on an expression on bliss. Gourmet fare! All for free! The photos here show him enjoying his outing to my humble local restaurant. One of his parents visited again in the afternoon, but didn't venture quite so close. Enjoy!

Hedgehogs - why can't they share the hedge?

The title here is stolen from a groan-worthy funny that was doing the rounds of the social networks recently.


Today my own family of hedgehogs was doing its own spot of social networking!


I regularly see a pair of adult hedgehogs, a male ('boar') and a slightly smaller female ('sow'), snorting and snuffling and chasing one another round the garden in the late spring evenings.


Today I saw the little product of all that frantic noisy courting.


The young hedgehog here is hardly a baby. Baby hedgehogs have soft, flexible spines. But it is certainly a youngster, much smaller than the adults. Adult males sometimes kill their male offspring, so either this one is a lady, or a very lucky little lad!

It was wandering around the garden at 1pm, early this afternoon. It sniffed at bird food, clambering  through the leaves and stems. Now its found its way along this particular hedgehog friendly ramble, I hope I see much more of the family in the summer days to come! 

Can't wait!

These cute little critters can hog my hedge just as much as they like!

The young hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus, the European or Common Hedgehog) exploring my garden

Nuthatch

Feeling very privileged to have been watching two young great spotted woodpeckers, a family of long tailed tits and a nuthatch who usually lives in the local woods, all coming to my garden feeders today. The unexpected nuthatch visit inspired me tonight as I sit waiting for twilight to fall, when the family of hedgehogs who are now dropping by my garden each evening arrive with their noisy but captivating shenanigans...


You scramble, head down,
Holding the world mirrored
Invert under scuttling feet


Clambering, chestnut breast to bark
Smoke blue wings a caped swoop,
Aerobat, probing and melting
On a tittering tightrope


Patient bill, plastering a pinhole persistent
To fend marauder starlings away from your babies.


D-I-Y dodger, framing the woodpecker brother's old pad
For your rental, yet wholly inhabiting
Your acorn carpeted aerodrome.


Scurrying sideways, dissolving
Through the beech canopy
Skimming your liquid voice's pebble
To skip over the rippling pool of dusk


High over hedgehogs chuckling
Through beech mast and littered leaves
On their way to a festival of surreptitious snorting
Under the bone-blanched moon
And the shrill verdict of owls

Hedgehog Hot Love

Last night in the twilight at about 9.20pm, two hedgehogs, a boar and a sow, were under the arch of berberis and Jacob's figleaf in my back garden, snuffling and snorting for England! The sow, slightly the larger and darker of the two and certainly the noisier last night, was rebuffing the male's sexual approaches.


They were nose to nose, snuffling and thrusting; the sow occasionally backed away a few steps and the boar pretended to lose interest by studying the undergrowth. Not fooling anybody! He'd be lunging and wiffling again a few seconds later. The soundtrack to all this was like a gruff sneeze on an infinite loop.


Eventually, after twenty minutes of this noisy courtship, the female withdrew to the opposite border under the lilac tree and waited coquettishly by the strawberry patch. The boar had got the message by now, though, and soon trotted off at top speed down the length of the garden, through the lavatera arch and away beyond the garden shed along the far hedge where the ash tree whispered in the deepening darkness.


Left alone, reluctant Mrs Tiggywinkle shuffled off under the hedge into the neighbour's garden and into the night. Romeo and Juliet they aren't, but practice makes perfect.


Topped off a wonderful week of wildlife which has seen new broods of Long Tailed Tits, Great Tits, Coal Tits, Blue Tits, young Great Spotted Woodpeckers (male yesterday, female visited today), Wrens, Blackbirds and Dunnocks all swarming round the feeders like humming birds on a mission!

Photos: Top is from the London Wildlife site (c) Richard Burkmar and bottom photo is from the site www.erinaceinae.com with thanks!

Hedgepiggy

I knew there was a good excuse waiting  for having some corners of my garden left random and untidy...and here he is. Spot the hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) wiffling through the fallen eucalyptus leaves near a section of privet hedge.

He took no notice at all of human proximity and carried on his quiet snuffling exploration of his twilight kingdom.

I've seen him before, enjoying a little tipple from the birds' water basin under the lilac tree. They say that each hedgehog prefers to have the space of twelve gardens to roam through before it makes you its privileged host. So I feel very blessed.

Update on the little Woodpigeon squab

If you read my last bloggery at the weekend, you might be wondering what happened to the little Woodpigeon who was attacked by an adult Woodie and seemed to react so little to everything going on around him.


Well, to update you, the little chap was sitting in the middle of the lawn later that evening at about 9pm, out in the open where any predator could grab him. Suddenly the big grey tomcat from a few doors away appeared at the far end of the garden and began to fixate on him and home in step by step. It lunged at the little pigeon and seemed to jump over him as the hapless squab flapped its wings but did not seem hurt or much bothered. 


The cat saw me in the conservatory and made no further attempts on the baby pigeon's life, as far as I could observe. Eventually the cat moved off the way it had come, stalking round the pigeon without giving it a second glance. The pigeon continued to sit huddled in the same position before shuffling off just before 10pm into the undergrowth (euphemism for the parts where my garden is rather beyond my strength and finances at the moment to keep weed-free!). At least he would be sheltered there, I hoped. But I haven't seen him since, and I suspect he may have succumbed to some other predator since his miraculous delivery from pouncing puss. 


I hope you had a gentle end or a blessed deliverance, little one.


I sat on until the light had completely dwindled to dusk, hearing the sounds of the approaching night and watching a hedgehog exploring and having a drink of the water I put out for the birds and creatures on the pebbles under my lilac bush.


So the longest day has come and gone. Bless the Lord who creates and sustains such a fragile, fantastic kingdom, and entrusts it to our hearts to protect and enjoy.