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Hedgehog Love
Update: 2024-09-16
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Meet Hedgehog Hugh—he's a conservationist who loves and studies... hedgehogs! Listen to how he discovered his favorite animal and how his love of hedgehogs helps to make the world a better place.
Guest: Hugh Warwick, spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society
Guest: Hugh Warwick, spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society
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Transcript
00:00:00
(upbeat music)
00:00:02
- Constant Wonder Kids is a constant wonder podcast.
00:00:05
- Hi Wonder Kids, it's Paige.
00:00:09
We talk about lots of different animals here on the Constant Wonder Kids show, from elephants to horses to bugs.
00:00:16
Today, I was wondering what are your favorite animals?
00:00:19
I asked a couple of wonder kids, and here's what they said to me.
00:00:22
- My favorite animal is a dog because they're cute and fun to play with.
00:00:28
I like giraffes because they have long necks.
00:00:31
- My favorite animal is a llama because they're super fluffy and really cool.
00:00:38
- I am a, this is a dog.
00:00:42
- Thanks for sharing your favorite animals.
00:00:44
Today, we're going to be talking to someone who has based his whole life around his favorite animal, the hedgehog.
00:00:51
Now, you may not know a lot about hedgehogs, but don't worry.
00:00:54
Soon you'll hear all about them.
00:00:57
I love all hedgehogs.
00:00:58
I love the look of them they're cute, they're fascinating.
00:01:01
I mean, hedgehog love is a big thing.
00:01:04
- This is Hugh Warwick, also known as hedgehog Hugh.
00:01:08
He's a scientist from Great Britain who studies hedgehogs.
00:01:12
In the United States, hedgehogs are really only capped as pets, but in Great Britain, where Hugh Warwick lives, hedgehogs are just as common as squirrels or raccoons living in your backyard.
00:01:25
- Hedgehog Hugh thinks that anyone who meets a hedgehog is going to love them.
00:01:30
Have you ever met a hedgehog before?
00:01:33
Here's how Hugh described them.
00:01:35
- They're a prickly mammal.
00:01:36
They are smaller than a porcupine, probably not much bigger than a ground squirrel maybe, and they are covered in prickles, like a porcupine, but shorter prickles.
00:01:46
The prickles are, as with a porcupine, they're modified hair, the same stuff as your fingernails, but they're really sharp.
00:01:53
And the thing a hedgehog does is it frowns.
00:01:57
It frowns at you, and what it does is that brings the prickles forward over its nose and its eyes, protects its face, and then when it's really worried, it rolls up into a ball.
00:02:05
And this is the sort of characteristic prickly ball you'll find of the hedgehog.
00:02:10
- Can you picture a hedgehog rolled up in a tiny ball, prickles out?
00:02:15
They roll up like that to defend themselves from predators.
00:02:18
Imagine trying to put a hedgehog in your mouth and getting poked on your tongue.
00:02:23
- No thank you.
00:02:24
When he talks about hedgehogs, you can tell how important they are to him.
00:02:29
He is fascinated by what hedgehogs can do and it's contagious.
00:02:34
He makes me feel really excited about hedgehogs.
00:02:37
Let's discover where hedgehog hues, love of hedgehogs began.
00:02:42
- For me, the love of nature, the love of the natural world has been very definitely something which was ready for.
00:02:49
My parents, neither of them particularly interested in the natural world, but right from the get-go.
00:02:56
It was animals that were the posters on the walls in my room.
00:02:59
It was the books I read about where about nature, about Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees.
00:03:03
- As an ecologist, hues studies the puzzle of the natural world.
00:03:09
He tries to figure out how all the pieces like plants and animals fit together and impact one another.
00:03:15
When he was first asked to study hedgehogs, he thought they were just another puzzle piece.
00:03:20
But soon, hedgehogs became much more to him.
00:03:24
- I was radio tracking hedgehogs, putting little transmitted devices on their backs and spending all night long wandering around, seeing what they got up to, we were trying to see if they could cope with being released back into the wild after being taken into a hedgehog rescue center.
00:03:40
- As he was tracking the hedgehogs, he lived all alone in a van, also called a caravan.
00:03:46
I was living on my own in a caravan at the top of a field, and there was a tap in the field, which was my functional sort of kitchen and washing facility.
00:03:54
And I had a small cala gas burner in my caravan.
00:03:57
And you get lonely.
00:04:00
So I named all of the hedgehogs I was studying.
00:04:02
And to my boss, he frowned upon that.
00:04:04
They'd all got numbers and I should have stuck with numbers apparently, but I named them.
00:04:08
One of them was Nigel, and Nigel was my favorite hedgehog by a long way.
00:04:13
My hedgehogs that I was radio tracking, some of them, when I turned up, would still roll up into a ball when it was my turn to bother their evening's activities.
00:04:22
Some of the hedgehogs had learnt that I was safe and not to be worried about, and so they would just run away, which was very irritating.
00:04:31
Nigel let me be there and didn't really sort of pay attention to me.
00:04:36
- For weeks, he who studied hedgehogs that would either run away or curl up into balls when they saw him, except for Nigel.
00:04:45
Nigel was different.
00:04:47
- Once you've spent weeks and weeks out at night with your hedgehogs, you want to get down to their level.
00:04:53
And I was doing that with Nigel on a small country lane, and I had this moment where Nigel had been snuffling along eating small slugs,
00:05:03
and then paused when he got close to me, and we were at this stage nose to nose.
00:05:09
And he looked at me.
00:05:10
And now you can be looked at, glanced at by animals.
00:05:16
And you can sense all sorts of fear or aggression or just lack of interest.
00:05:24
But there was a moment where Nigel looked at me and there was just, I could feel him assessing me.
00:05:31
And making a decision that I wasn't a worry, and then he carried on snuffling along eating.
00:05:37
And for me, that was a moment when liking, slipped across that invisible line into loving.
00:05:44
One night out with Nigel made all the difference.
00:05:47
- Just like that, Hugh fell in love with hedgehogs.
00:05:50
His interest in the little creatures has inspired him to write three books about hedgehogs, travel the world to encounter different types of hedgehogs, and collect all sorts of hedgehog themed items.
00:06:02
On his adventures, he has been to many fun hedgehog events, including the hedgehog Olympics.
00:06:10
- Now in the Americas, you have got pet hedgehogs.
00:06:14
A lot of people are very, very fond of those hedgehogs.
00:06:16
So many years ago, I was invited over to Denver in Colorado to go to the Rocky Mountain hedgehog show.
00:06:26
I was invited across there to speak about my work.
00:06:30
I did my bit and I was then asked if I wanted to stay for the International Hedgehog Olympic Games.
00:06:37
Now, because I'm English, I am used to people using vast amounts of irony and sarcasm, and I'm just waiting for the joke.
00:06:45
- It wasn't a joke.
00:06:46
There really was a hedgehog Olympic Games.
00:06:50
- And it's actually more of a triathlon than an Olympic Games.
00:06:53
And the hedgehogs have to do a sprint in a large hamster ball.
00:06:57
You're not allowed to clap because that upsets them, but you can do jazz hands.
00:07:00
Then there's the hurdles, which for an animal, not normally predisposed to jumping is a challenge.
00:07:05
You can encourage it with mealworms and things, but you're not allowed to touch them.
00:07:09
And those are both timed events.
00:07:10
And then the third discipline is the most esoteric of some.
00:07:13
It's the floor exercises where the hedgehog has to go through a tunnel over a tea to totter and for reasons nobody could adequately explain.
00:07:22
Knock over a my little pony.
00:07:25
- That sounds like quite the show.
00:07:26
I would love to go to the hedgehog Olympics one day.
00:07:30
However, as Hugh has studied and loved hedgehogs over the years, not all of his discoveries have been happy once.
00:07:38
- The hedgehog, if you trace a five million years or so back, we've got proto hedgehog evidence, fossil evidence, possibly from the time when there was still dinosaurs,
00:07:48
so 70 million years ago.
00:07:50
They have been around for a very long time.
00:07:52
They've outlasted the woolly mammoths and the saber-toothed tigers.
00:07:56
And for a lot of that time, they've been pretty much the same because they found a form which works and they deal with it.
00:08:02
- Hedgehogs have been around a long time because they have defense mechanisms like their prickly spines and ability to roll up into balls.
00:08:11
With these characteristics, they've been able to avoid predators and get around to the food and water they need until humans started building things that got in their way.
00:08:21
- What we've done is transform the environment so dramatically that their populations are declining.
00:08:28
- Hedgehogs are disappearing.
00:08:30
Because of the impact humans have had on their habitats, hedgehogs are having a hard time surviving and thriving like they used to.
00:08:37
While this is a scary problem, Hugh is determined to find out what's going on so that he can help the little creatures he loves.
00:08:45
- The hedgehog is a small, little animal.
00:08:47
We've got little legs, but as I've radiotracted them, I know this, they can easily move two kilometers in a night.
00:08:53
- That's pretty far.
00:08:55
Two kilometers is like running around a track five times.
00:08:59
- They do this length of traveling because they're looking for mates, they're looking for food, they're looking for water and they're looking for shelter.
00:09:07
The four sort of principle things that keep you as a species going.
00:09:11
- In order to travel to find everything that they require to survive, hedgehogs need space to roam.
00:09:18
One place where they wander is human neighborhoods or as Hugh refers to it, suburbia.
00:09:24
- Hedgehogs have found that suburbia is fantastic.
00:09:27
A brilliant environment because there is a patchwork of different sorts of habitat.
00:09:32
Yeah, one garden has got a hedge and a log pile and other garden has got a pond and other garden has got lots of brambles at the back of it.
00:09:39
And they can move between these, gaining all of those things they need, a chance to encounter a mate, shelter, food and water.
00:09:46
But there is a problem if you put up fences that a hedgehogs can't get through.
00:09:51
- So what he's saying is that hedgehogs would be perfectly happy to live in English neighborhoods, moving yard to yard except for one problem.
00:09:59
They can't climb fences.
00:10:02
- We've understood this problem for a while but we launched 10 years ago now, a campaign called hedgehogs Street.
00:10:08
So it's unlikely that your garden will be big enough to support a population of hedgehogs, but if you start to join up all of the gardens down the street, making small little hedgehog holes,
00:10:19
just 13 centimeters square, which will enable the hedgehogs to be able to move.
00:10:24
- By cutting little holes about the size of a cell phone into their fences, people in England can give hedgehogs room to move around and create a hedgehog highway.
00:10:35
- People are fascinated by having hedgehogs in their gardens and they want to go to great lengths to encourage that.
00:10:41
And for me, I'm really supportive of this.
00:10:44
Yes, because it's great to help hedgehogs, but when you're helping the hedgehog, you're helping so many other species too.
00:10:49
And this is what I'm really trying to encourage is to get people excited about hedgehogs so that they will be excited about toads and they'll be excited about newts and they'll be excited about everything else as well.
00:11:00
- As people began working together, they were able to create miles of pathways for hedgehogs in their neighborhoods.
00:11:08
Sometimes it wasn't as easy as just cutting a hole in the fence.
00:11:13
- And North Rocks are there's a village called Curtlington.
00:11:15
And in Curtlington, there is this human dynamo called Chris Powell's and he decided that what they would do is look at their village and see how they can make the maximum amount of open space with the minimum number of holes.
00:11:30
And he had a trouble that his garden was two and a half feet lower than his neighbors.
00:11:34
And so he built a staircase and I thought he was joking, but he sent me the video of the first night that the staircase was opened.
00:11:42
The hedgehog uses the staircase.
00:11:44
And then last time I saw him, he said, you've got to see the next one.
00:11:48
And so he's built a ramp and it is a long ramp and it's a garden which is I think nearly four feet higher than the neighbors.
00:11:55
And so this ramp allows the hedgehog to run up into it.
00:11:58
And essentially what he's doing is creating a sort of sonic the hedgehog course.
00:12:02
And at some point in the future, we'll sort of bait the entire thing and then have a hedgehog doing it, I reckon.
00:12:08
- By building ramps and staircases, Hugh, Chris and other humans are able to help the hedgehogs they love go where they need to go.
00:12:17
Hugh explains that the love he feels for the hedgehogs is an important part of his conservation work.
00:12:23
- Our relationship with the natural world isn't going to come about because we've watched some amazing documentaries about reaching humpback whales or whatever.
00:12:33
It's gonna come about because we've actually had an experience with an animal close to.
00:12:38
We've got nose to nose with something.
00:12:39
We've looked into the eyes of something.
00:12:41
- Hugh believes that when we love the animals in our own backyards, animals like hedgehogs, squirrels, porcupines, birds, deer, bunnies, then we will want to make the world a better place for them.
00:12:55
So what's your favorite animal in your backyard?
00:12:58
Have you thought of one?
00:13:00
Here's what he wants you to do.
00:13:02
- I want you to find the animal, which you can do the hedgehog thing with and there must be species there.
00:13:08
I mean, you've got such an amazingly diverse ecosystem over there and just to find animals, which allow you to form some sort of connection above the birds may feed from the bird feeder in the garden and you may see bears in a distance.
00:13:25
But to actually find something you can form a point of connection with.
00:13:29
And for me, that is where love begins.
00:13:33
We will not fight to say what we do not love.
00:13:36
And I desperately want people to fall in love with the natural world.
00:13:41
I don't care.
00:13:42
Please don't tell a hedgehog this.
00:13:43
I don't care what species it is.
00:13:46
I want people to find a connection.
00:13:48
So let's find something to fall in love with and let's start a fight.
00:13:51
- Hedgehog Q has shown us how our love for the animals around us can motivate us to keep their habitat safe.
00:14:00
So the next time you see one of your favorite animals, whether it be in your backyard or at the zoo, think about what you can do to help.
00:14:07
When we love animals, we can make a difference.
00:14:11
(upbeat music)
00:14:13
♪ Hedgehogs, hedgehogs, cutest can be ♪ ♪ A prickly little friend for you and for me ♪ ♪ We can help them and give them their space ♪ ♪ Hedgehogs make the world a better place ♪ (upbeat music)
00:14:34
- A quick word for you, parents.
00:14:39
This is Marcus Smith.
00:14:40
I'm host of the Constant Wonder Podcast, which is where material for Constant Wonder kids comes from.
00:14:46
We made this episode because Constant Wonder contains a lot of great stuff kids will love too.
00:14:53
But you may be wanting more.
00:14:55
We've got a whole episode devoted to hedgehog Q with his work as an ecologist.
00:15:00
And if you want to hear the full presentation, go find Constant Wonder wherever you get your podcasts.
00:15:06
The episode is called The World's Most Important Creature.
00:15:10
We actually think you'll love more than just one episode of our podcast.
00:15:13
It's an ongoing quest to find awe and wonder in all creation, human or wild, vast or small, the kind of encounters that move us beyond words.
00:15:24
Remember when you had time for wonder, when we suspect you still do.
00:15:29
Subscribe to Constant Wonder on your favorite platform.
00:15:32
Constant Wonder Kids was produced by Page Crumberman Darington with Sound Design by Mitchell Towslay.
00:15:39
Constant Wonder Kids is a production of BYU Radio.
00:15:42
(soft music)
00:15:45
[MUSIC]
00:15:55