A south Dublin correspondent who nightly puts out food for badgers, and who draws from two to six, now says that he has seen a hedgehog on the lawn for the first time in years. "When we came here, nearly four decades ago, hedgehogs were, along with shrews, the main mammals on the property. Slowly they dropped out of the picture and for years not one was seen." The reader may wonder what good hedgehogs bring to a suburban garden. Well, if you are pestered by snails, you would be delighted by the crunching nightly sounds. For years, a friend swore his small garden, old-fashionedly enclosed by rough stone walls, would resound to the grinding of the shells, giving him an excellent kitchen garden for salads and greens of all kinds.
In this case there are no salads to be protected, but the hedgehog adds to the nightly spectacle of at least two, and up to six, badgers, a fox (once a vixen with three cubs) and, surprisingly, half-wild cats moving among this throng without being attacked - on the spot anyway. Fairley, in his Irish Beast Book, tells us that hedgehogs have been domesticated in Europe since the fourth century BC. The Romans used their spiny coats for "hacking cloth or in wool-carding". And the Romans, known as "gastronomical experimenters", would probably have eaten them. Fairley quotes a naturalist, Frank Buckland of the last century, who told of a farm where they were consumed regularly and of a market in the City of London where dealers sold them in large numbers. A delicacy, no doubt.
You may recall a land-owner in Britain trying to popularise the eating of grey squirrels, which are consumed regularly in parts of the United States. Hedgehogs are generally absent where badgers are numerous, it is written in Collins's Field Guide to Mammals. But the badgers were here before any of the current inhabitants, human and others. Surprising statistic from the same book: hedgehogs have 6,000 erectile spines. They are good climbers and swimmers. Food includes worms, beetles, caterpillars, slugs and snails, occasionally frogs, lizards, maybe even birds' eggs. Carrion, too.
This one was nibbling something in the grass, was not tempted to try a few monkey nuts and when the inspection was over, glided into the shubs.