Hedgehogs in the hedgerows

The end of summer is probably an odd time of year to start a nature blog, but I just can't wait till spring. I really love being outdoors at the moment and The River Field is where I'm spending most of my time. It's a 4.5 acre field on the banks of a fast flowing river full of young woodland and grassy meadow, home to hundreds of birds, butterflies, bugs and animals. I'm halfway through building a kind of Celtic roundhouse and will be sharing pictures of that as I go too.

So here's the first post, a picture of a hedgehog I found snuffling in the hedgerow. There are 17 species of hedgehog in the world, apparently, and they are indigenous to every continent except North America and Australia. They are not particularly popular in the Western Isles of Scotland, due to their taste for ground-nesting wader birds' eggs. In England, however, they've been on the Biodiversity Action Plan list since 2007, indicating the need for conservation and protection of the species. According to the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, cattle grids are like oubliette death traps to hedgehogs. I'm going to install a hedgehog emergency escape ramp in mine after reading that.

The European hedgehog is known in Irish as a 'Grainneog'. They are usually nocturnal creatures, so I was a bit bemused to come across this little guy in the daylight. He didn't look sick, and his spikes all seemed healthy. He was foraging in the undergrowth for slugs and worms and other tasty morsels, I guessed, to take home to his babies. Hedgehogs have two litters, one in May/June and one in August/September, and with four or five babies in a litter, so the parents must be pretty busy at this time of year. Baby hedgehogs are called hoglets. Aww!