Helping hedgehogs

It may be the nation’s favourite mammal, but the hedgehog is rapidly vanishing from towns and countryside across the UK. Why have things gone so badly wrong for British hedgehogs? And, more importantly, what’s being done to help them?

- Hugh Warwick

When I started studying hedgehogs back in 1985, there was no thought that these peculiar, fascinating and adorable creatures might be under serious threat. The main concerns for hedgehogs revolved around the numbers being killed on roads – something that became an oft-repeated joke and, rather ironically, led them to being used by the Department for Transport, in cartoon form, as a road-safety educational tool for children.

What a difference a few decades make. By 2020, the hedgehog had joined the sorry list of species considered as Vulnerable to Extinction (in the next 20 years) on the Red List for British Mammals.

Cracks start to show

The first shot across the bow came in 2006, when the hedgehog was listed as a species of principle importance under the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act. I remember thinking – naively – how great this was, because now the state conservation machinery would surely kick into gear and make things better.

But that machinery has long been undermined. And, after a while, it started to become clear that if anyone was going to do anything, it would have to be the conservationists and ecologists who were already involved.

The next dramatic change in the campaign to help hedgehogs came in 2011. The wonderful BBC natural history television producer Dilys Breese had left money in her will to the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS), to be spent on conservation. She also left money to the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES). In the cut and thrust world of many charities, this could have sparked competition. But the two charities realised that what they could achieve by working together was so much greater – and thus Hedgehog Street was born, an incredible initiative that celebrates its 10th birthday this year.