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.
These are urban problems for urban hogs. The leg injury may have been the result of a strimmer, as those who wield them rarely check long grass and brambles where hedgehogs sleep. Or was it bitten by a curious dog, which perhaps also disturbed Bertie’s nest? Or could Bloody-Nose or Missing Leg have been Bertie’s mum, and did he leave the nest when she didn’t return?
As for the glitter, it had been Pride weekend, and his drain will not have been the only one hosting the glittery remains of parties. We shouldn’t be washing glitter into drains, our sewerage systems, the sea, and we certainly shouldn’t be coating hedgehogs in them.
But we are. This is the city, and we have to rub along together. But I’ll be emailing the council about strimming, and posting about hogs in local Facebook groups. I’m also patrolling the park to see if I can find anything – a sibling of Bertie, a curious dog. Hedgehog numbers in Britain are nowhere near what they were last century. But urban parks and gardens can be havens for them, and I’m determined to keep it that way.
• Country diary is on Twitter/X at @gdncountrydiary
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 (Guardian Faber) is published on 26 September; pre-order now at the guardianbookshop.com and get a 20% discount
