Britain’s hedgehogs are in a prickly situation. Meet their rescuers.

Jo Wilkinson realized she was losing her students’ attention, so she turned to an old friend: the hedgehog.

As a sustainability and engagement officer at Britain’s University of Sheffield, she wanted to rally students around sustainable foods and energy conservation. But it could be hard to hold students’ interest. That was until she proposed building a “hedgehog safari” trail on campus. Soon, her fun distraction became a campuswide campaign.

“I recognized straightaway that hedgehogs captured everyone’s imagination,” says Ms. Wilkinson. “There’s something about them that does that to people.”

Her effort to expand hedgehog habitats at Sheffield earned British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) funding in 2019. That’s when she started thinking about