In recent weeks, four hedgehogs have been found in various states of dishevelment in my local park – one dead, one bleeding from the nose, another with half a leg missing. Then there was Bertie, a four-week-old baby found screaming in a drain, covered in fleas and glitter. The bloody-nosed and missing-leg hogs were taken to rescues by other members of the community; the dead hog lives on in my compost heap. But I played ambulance to Bertie, scooping him up and driving him to my local rescue.
A four-week-old male, he was half the size he should have been, emaciated and so dehydrated that he couldn’t open his eyes. “Why’s he covered in glitter?” asked Helen, his rehabber, as she weighed him, wiped fleas from his body and administered life-saving fluids. She popped him in a towel in an incubator to give him some of the comfort he should still have been having from Mum in the nest, and put a camera on him so she could keep an eye on him. She would check on him every two hours, she said.
