RSPB Spotlight Hedgehogs

By James Lowen

RSPB Spotlight: Hedgehogs is packed with eye-catching, informative colour photos, and features succinct and detailed text written by a knowledgeable naturalist.

Much loved - but about to be lost? The Hedgehog regularly tops polls of the UK's favourite animal, yet numbers in our countryside have halved this century. Generations of children have been captivated by Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, though our complex and contradictory relationship with the Hedgehog is also characterised by persecution and death. This unmistakable, spiny mammal is a 'gardener's best friend', but one that we rarely see alive and in our midst.

In Spotlight: Hedgehogs, James Lowen reveals what a Hedgehog is and how it lives, unveiling the secrets of its lifestyle, such as foraging and hibernating, rolling into a ball and building a nest. He also investigates the relationship between Hedgehogs and people – from film and fun to conservation and crisps – and offers practical advice on how to find, watch and help these charming animals in the wild.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781472950079

James Lowen

James Lowen is an experienced naturalist and award-winning author whose books include Much Ado About Mothing, British Moths, Birds of France and Bloomsbury's RSPB Spotlights on Badgers and Hedgehogs. Two of his books received the accolade of Travel Guidebook of the Year, and James also writes for publications such as The Telegraph, BBC Wildlife, Nature's Home and The Countryman. jameslowen.com / @JLowenWildlife

Book preview

Contents

Meet the Hedgehogs

Bodywork

Breeding and Growth

Home, Habits and Food

(Anti)social Life

Threats and Conservation

Hedgehogs and People

Hedgehogs in Culture

How to See Hedgehogs

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Resources

Image Credits

Meet the Hedgehogs

The star of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle has worked its way into the hearts of successive generations of children and has long been coveted by gardeners for munching slugs. It is little surprise then that the Hedgehog routinely tops polls of favourite UK animals. Yet behind the Hedgehog’s appealing front lies a little-known, scarcely seen and ever-rarer mammal with which humans have a contradictory and complex relationship that encompasses reverence and persecution, humour and hope, death and resurrection.

Cute face and spiny body: who can fail to be charmed by the Hedgehog?

There may be no more immediately recognisable European mammal than the Hedgehog Erinaceus europaeus. Packed with prickles, this is not a species that one can mistake. Yet many of us – too many of us – know the Hedgehog only by image or by icon. Just one-fifth of UK residents claim to have seen a live Hedgehog in the wild – far fewer than are familiar with fictional characters such as Mrs Tiggy-Winkle or Sonic.

This is ironic, for Hedgehogs live among us – manoeuvring between our gardens, trotting along our pavements and crossing our roads. They are often our closest wild-mammal neighbour, yet we understand so little about them. We have long been fascinated by their resurrection in spring, yet their waking months largely pass us by. Many people devote chunks of their life to caring for Hedgehogs, yet our recent ancestors treated them as vermin. This book seeks to redress the balance, to celebrate Hedgehogs and what they have meant to us across several millennia.

A welcome garden visitor.

Hedgehogs’ family tree

If there is one thing that biologists truly delight in arguing about, it is taxonomy – the science of classifying species. In the mid-18th century, a Swedish naturalist named Carl Linnaeus produced a ground-breaking attempt to classify and name all life forms. Many of his decisions have stood the test of time. But with the rise of DNA technology, in particular, scientists are increasingly changing how they group animals (and plants and fungi, and so on). Hedgehogs bear witness to this.

Carl Linnaeus, the godfather of taxonomy.

Until the early 21st century, hedgehogs were associated with moles, shrews and other small mammals within the order ‘Insectivora’ (literally ‘insect-eaters’). Biologists were aware that this grouping was a bit of a dumping ground for mammalian miscellanea – not least because many of its members feasted on things other than insects. So there was comparatively little disgruntlement when various components of the Insectivora were spun off into separate groupings. Hedgehogs were granted their very own order, Erinaceomorpha, an accolade that suggested they had no particularly close relatives.

Many biologists think this classification makes sense and have stopped the taxonomic wheel here; however, others consider it too radical. The alternative view is that hedgehogs form Erinaceidae, one of four living families making up the order Eulipotyphla (which means ‘truly fat and blind’). The rest of the quartet of families comprises those that house familiar species such as shrews and moles, but also lesser-known mammals such as desmans (bizarre aquatic mammals from Eurasia) and solenodons (odd burrowing animals from Caribbean islands). The ‘family tree’ above adopts this second approach.

A pointed snout is one clue that shrews (left: Pygmy Shrew) and hedgehogs are close relatives.

Current classification within the order Eulipotyphla

Whichever approach is correct, what does this mean for other conspicuously spiny mammals, such as porcupines, spiny rats, echidnas (spiny anteaters from Australia) and tenrecs (prickly insectivores from Madagascar that are nearly dead ringers for hedgehogs)? Given that spines are a particularly peculiar physical characteristic, you might be forgiven for thinking that all mammals possessing them might be closely related to hedgehogs. But they are not. Porcupines, for example, are part of the rodent family, which contains rats and squirrels. It transpires that all these spiny mammals evolved their unusual outer layer independently – a phenomenon that biologists call ‘convergent evolution’. The connection between these lookalikes is barely skin-deep.

Echidnas (top) and porcupines (bottom) are both spiny mammals, but neither are related to hedgehogs.

Hedgehog evolution

The direct ancestors of hedgehogs probably first appeared in Asia during what is known as the Eocene period, 34–56 million years ago – although there is some recorded evidence of hedgehog-like animals 70 million years ago (when dinosaurs still ruled the Earth!). The first recognisably modern-day hedgehog trotted across the ground around 15 million years ago (and trot they did, dispersing through Africa, Europe and North America). This makes hedgehogs far older than famous, long-extinct mammals such as sabre-toothed cats and woolly mammoths.

Even more remarkably, the inaugural design of the hedgehog has survived largely intact, without need for modifications. Hedgehogs have been pretty much fit for purpose since the outset.

Evolution within the genus Erinaceus has been relatively recent. Scientists have used DNA ‘footprinting’ to unravel the role of ice ages in creating new species of hedgehogs. When ice sheets moved southwards across Europe, animals were trapped in three principal regions: Iberia, Italy and the Balkans. Isolated from one another, populations developed slightly different characteristics. As the ice retreated, the hedgehogs spread out – but by now they were distinct species, incapable of breeding with one another.

Fascinatingly, it appears that humans have been aware of the existence of hedgehogs for many thousands of years. This conclusion is based on the astonishing discovery from the Swabian Jura (present-day Baden-Württemberg, Germany) of more than 50 figurines carved from mammoth ivory. These were found in six caves that were occupied by humans 43,000 to 35,000 years ago. One of the ancient sculptures is a representation of what appears to be a hedgehog, approximately 3cm (1in) long, with incisions representing the spines (see below). In 2017, the caves – and their ice-age art – were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

A world of hedgehogs

As we have seen, working out where hedgehogs slot into the mammalian world order has proved tricky. At least there is no dispute about what constitutes a ‘hedgehog’. Following extinctions in North America 5–20 million years ago, the hedgehog family (Erinaceidae) is now wholly restricted to the Old World, occurring across Europe, Africa and Asia.

The family is divided into two subfamilies: ‘spiny hedgehogs’ (the subfamily Erinaceinae) and ‘hairy hedgehogs’ (the Hylomyinae, sometimes known as the Galericinae). The latter comprises the moonrats and gymnures of South East Asia. These eight or so species are split between five genera. Somewhat shrew-like in appearance, Hylomyinae are furry rather than spiny and possess long, rather hairless, rat-like tails. It takes imagination to think of them as ‘hedgehogs’ (and indeed, these two subfamilies last shared a common ancestor 26–38 million years ago), but exchange an elongated tail for prickles and you might manage it.

The hedgehog family (Erinaceidae) encompasses ‘spiny hedgehogs’ (above) and ‘hairy hedgehogs’ such as this Lesser Gymnure (below).

Current classification within the spiny hedgehog subfamily Erinaceinae

Four-toed Hedgehog (Atelerix albiventris), Amur Hedgehog (Erinaceus amurensis).

Long-eared Hedgehog (Hemiechinus auritus), Daurian Hedgehog (Mesechinus dauuricus).

Indian Hedgehog (Paraechinus micropus).

The spiny group is what we immediately think of when we hear or see the word ‘hedgehog’. Biologists’ views of how the Erinaceinae is composed have evolved over time. Even now, there are different perspectives on how many species the group includes and how many genera they are split between. Current approaches cut the subfamily into either fourteen species across four genera (Atelerix, Erinaceus, Hemiechinus and Paraechinus) or sixteen species across five (additionally Mesechinus, see figure).

Whichever approach is correct, obvious physical differences between the genera are typically slight, and are more than outweighed by shared features such as largely concealed legs, a long muzzle and spiny coat. Compare this with, say, the much more obvious variance within the cat family (Felidae), which includes members with spotted, striped and plain fur, short and long tails, and physiques built for speed or for strength.

All four species of Atelerix