‘When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, “He strove that such innocent creature should come to no harm"’
- Afterwards, Thomas Hardy
The hedgehog, Hardy’s furtive friend, has permeated British culture for centuries. From its biblical apparitions as a manifestation of the deadly sins, to the delightful St. Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital, the hedgehog has been cherished by English society for millennia. Living in ancient hedgerows, amongst the patchwork countryside, the hedgehog hibernates under a blanket of blackthorn and ivy. It roams suburbia, harvesting garden grubs and is sometimes found teetering on the curb of the roadside, or regretfully rendered two-dimensional by the modern motor vehicle... There is no doubt that this gentle being is quintessential to the English landscape.
Hedgehogs have long been a resident to the British Isles. Its ancestors strode with the triceratops and scarcely escaped the jaws of the tyrannosaurus rex but today, 56 million years later, the hedgehog has met its match. First discussed in parliament during the 1566 Act for the Preservation of Grain, the government provided a tuppence ‘for the heades of everie otter or hedgehogges’ due to the belief that it would 'suckle on the teat of the recumbent cow'. It was only in 2015, for the first time since 1566, that the hedgehog was spoken about in the House of Commons. ‘The hedgehog is a very prickly issue’ Rory Stewart declared, ‘before we mock our ancestors, the scientific mistakes we made in the past about the hedgehog are mistakes that we too may be mocked for in the future’. He is indeed right, the hedgehog's history can teach us a lesson in scientific humility.
The Hedgerow
In 1950, the ecologist Maurice Burton estimated the English hedgehog population size as 36.5 million, however, by 1995 there was a mere 1.1 million left (and a heart-wrenching 522,000 by 2018). Why did these numbers decline so dramatically? The 1950’s were a prosperous time for agriculture as new technologies pumped good ol’ English husbandry and hardiness into the post-war economy. Government policies obsessed over increasing exports and reducing imports, they flooded the industry with subsidies and rhetoric about the importance of self-sufficiency. Increasing productivity was of paramount importance and agricultural practices in the 1950s and 1960s were largely monotonic for the purpose of increasing yields. Between 1946 and 1985 agricultural outputs grew annually by 2.3% and between 1935 and 1960 the output of British agriculture rose from £438 million to £877 million (in 1960 monetary value - thats £4.2 billion and £8.3 billion respectively today). These figures, produced by the determination and perseverance from the population, was a major victory for Britain, however, in the process we lost a dear friend... the hedgerow.
Aerial Photography of East Anglican countryside, 1928
Source: ‘Thetford’ Photograph, Britain From Above archive, ref. EPW021549
Aerial photography of East Anglian countryside, 1950
Source: ‘Leighton Bromswold’, Photograph, Britain From Above, ref. EAW031105, (1950)
A study conducted in 1974 suggested that hedgerows in the immediate post war period (1946 to 1963) were destructed at a rate of 3,000 miles per year. That's 51,000 miles of hedgerows lost in less than twenty years, over a hundred times the length of England (40 percent of hedges which had existed in 1945 had been removed by 1972). Their destruction increased available farmland and between 1950 and 1960, when the profitability of agriculture attracted wealthy landlords, smaller holdings were consolidated into larger units and smaller fields melded into larger ones. Land under hedges is not under crop and for economies of scale fences are more flexible and became increasingly attractive. So down came the hedgerows...
Hedgerows provide heterogeneity in an otherwise monotonous landscape. Our oldest hedges are resident to over 2070 different species, a statistic which is thought to be severely underestimated. They provide shelter, boarders, and corridors of biodiversity for travelling species. The countryside is neatly sectioned into varying shades of green and yellow fields, partitioned by hedges; this is what Hugh Warwick has termed our ‘linescapes’. Manicured hedges, walls, ditches, and dykes are a place of meeting for wildlife, asserts Warwick, but ‘for all the wildness they might suggest, hedges are, above all, man-made, and monuments of history.’ They are shaped, maintained, and designed to enclose and, while this is not a problem if the hedgerow network is thick, healthy, connected and richly diverse, the modern trend of thinning or destroying hedges adversely affects migrating animals as they become fenced in to smaller, and increasingly unviable fragments.
Hedgerows have been replaced with fences, a popular 2oth Century phenomenon, and this has had far-reaching ecological consequences (and although I love the aesthetics of an traditional English iron fence they are certainly not optimal habitats for hedgehogs and English mammals alike). Losing hundreds of years of ecological heritage over small marginal gains on the field is mournful considering hedgerows have benefits for the farmer – they reduce soil erosion and retain soil moisture. Getting rid of the hedgerow was seen as a necessary process for the post-war economy and, admittedly, maintaining rich biodiversity was not a government top priority (and many of the benefits of keeping hedgerows was not known until later into the 20th century), rather keeping mouths fed and the economy alive was of paramount importance. It is needless to say, however, that reading this agricultural history is vital to understanding the impact of the human industrial footprint on English wildlife.
'Hedge'- hog
Commemorative Stamp of the Hedgehog, 1977
Source: 'Hedgehog' stamp, designed by Patrick Oxenham for the Post Office, 5th October 1977
The hedgerow is central to the hedgehog’s identity. With the prefix ‘hedge-’ constituting part of its colloquial name, it is understandable how the elimination of the hedgehog’s primary habitat had a deeply concerning impact. Hedgehogs spend 60 percent of their time within 5 meters of a hedge and the minimum habitat required for a sustainable hedgehog population is the size of three 18-hole golf courses- this amounts to a square kilometer which is not chopped up by fences, walls, or roads. The removal of hedgerows limited the range of suitable habitats for the hedgehog and restricted its ability to find suitable nesting sites and hibernation spots. 80 percent of hedgehog nesting sites are found in hedgerows; their destruction left the hedgehog vulnerable.
Fragmented habitats are not just a nuisance for nesting but they also leave hedgehogs open to predation. Badgers compete with hedgehogs for the same food but they also predate on hedgehogs to remove competitors for the limited worm supply, as Warwick put it, they generate a landscape of fear. The fewer and thinner hedges are, the greater the chance a hedgehog will find a sett. By this end, farmers were inadvertently farming badgers in the post-war years very successfully.
Macro-invertebrate food loss in rural areas, partly due to the lack of hedgerows, increased friction between badgers and hedgehogs, two species which have lived harmoniously on this planet for 10,000 years. However, the problem hedgehogs have faced is ecological. Badgers have only been acting on survival instinct resulting from to the loss of bioabundence - a distinct lack of abundance of all life forms in localised areas including plants species for shelter, insects for food, and corridors for safe travel. It is ’ecologically illiterate’ Warwick proclaimed, to attribute hedgehog population declines to badgers because the discussion of extinction should be addressed holistically, and the destruction of the hedgerow is one *very significant* factor.
Source: 'The State of Britain’s Hedgehogs 2022' report by People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) (click here)
The Future
As we learn from the past we must not dwell on what has disappeared and divert our attention to what remains. While habitat destruction and food scarcity has pushed the rural hedgehog population to the brink, recent studies have suggested that urban hedgehog populations are showing signs of recovery. Towns and cities have green spaces (gardens, commons, parks) which provide hedgehogs with a refuge from pressures which exist in rural environments. 2016 saw the population vote this lovable creature as the UK's no.1 mammal and today there are over 100,000 'hedgehog champions' campaigning for widespread hedgehog conservation. One successful example is the infamous 'hedgehog highway' movement which is rapidly growing. This campaign encourages property owners to cut holes into the bottom of their fences to allow safe passage of hedgehogs between gardens in search of mates, food, or hibernation spots. Cities and towns, therefore, have the potential to sustain large numbers of hedgehogs and urban planners should jump on this hedgehog-mania band wagon.
We are currently in the mist of the sixth mass extinction. Hedgehogs, currently living on the IUCN Red List as a vulnerable to extinction, do not have to follow the fate of the lynx or the bear, long-lost animals lost to English folklore. Rather, with our help, they should follow in the footsteps of the otter or the beaver, two species making a slow and steady return to the georgic English landscape. Sanguinity may be dangerous territory, but it is a starting point, and I know that I, an overly optimistic postgraduate student, born and bred in country-bumpkin Dorset and only just dipping her toe into the proverbial pool of grown-up life, have my fingers firmly crossed for this utterly-adorable and intelligent species.
P.S. You will not regret watching Rory Stewart's sensational speech to Parliament on the cultural representation of the Hedgehog - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqTkLoekm_0
Written by Beatrix Knight
References
Rory Stewart, ‘Hedgehog Conservation’, Speech in House of Commons, 10th November 2015, Hansard Volume 602
M. Burton, The Hedgehog, (London: Corgi, 1969)
S. Harris, ‘A Review of British Mammals: Population Estimates and Conservation Status of British Mammals Other Than Cetaceans’, ResearchGate, (1995)
F. Mathews, ‘A Review of the population and conservation of British Mammals’, Natural England, (2018)
R. Robinson and W. Sutherland, ‘Post-war changes in arable farming and biodiversity in Great Britain’, Journal of Applied Ecology, 39, (2002), 157 – 176 (165)
P. Brassley, ‘Output and technical change in twentieth-century British agriculture’, Agricultural History Review, 48, (2000), 60-84 (62)
R. Wolton, ’Life In A Hedge’, British Wildlife, 26, (2015), 306-316
Hugh Warwick, Linescapes, (London: Vintage, 2017)
Hugh Warwick, A Prickly Affair, (London: Vintage, 2008)
E. Pollard, M. Hooper, N. Moore, Hedges, (London: Harper Collins, 1974),
Agricultural landscapes: 33 years of change (CA220) part 4, Natural England, 2006, Gloucetershire
’Destruction Of Hedgerows’, House of Lords, 5th August 1975, Hansard Volume 363
R. Yarnell, C. Pettett, Beneficial Land Management for Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) in the United Kingdom
Comentarios