Hedgehogs

When my grannie was a child in Ireland, she told me how she spent hours playing with wild hedgehogs in the hedgerows dividing the fields. I imagined her crawling into tangled briar hedges to rescue them from themselves as they snoozed snug as dormice in their little dens. So I've always been intrigued by them.

In Scotland, they say it's bad luck to encounter a hedgehog, or, as they call it, a furzepig, on any road, high or low, after dark. But hedgehogs only come out at dusk. Does that mean hedgehogs are bad luck no matter what? Or is it strictly an off-road love affair?

Someone, most likely an Englishman visiting his summer holiday croft, ferried hedgehogs in a handbag to the Hebrides in 1974—ostensibly to control the snails and slugs in his garden. Things got out of hand. Hedgehogs now outnumber Uist island residents 2:1.

Hedgehogs, whose only living relatives are umpossom-ably ugly Borneo moonrats, share a distant ancestry to shrews. They are voracious as pigs and rats, and have no natural enemies. And that spells bad luck for shore birds and other ground-nesting birds, including the corncrake, as they are endangered due to the groundhog's lustful appetites. According to hedgehogs—escargot is overrated. They prefer their eggs raw.

I once heard corncrakes gather at dusk in the hedges of Iona singing like electric fences. Uist now exports more non-native hedgehogs than sheep to the Scottish mainland. So much for the corncrakes. There are only so many ways you can prepare a shepherd pie of hedgehog and wild haggis. The Hebrides hogs are routinely airlifted to Ayrshire. WWRB say? Tae A Hedgehoglet? Not exactly a sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie for a' tha.

Meanwhile, washerwoman Mrs Tiggy-Winkle's relatives have their own rather mundane holiday hovel hidaway replete with tiny clothespegs in Beatrix Potter's garden in Dunkeld near Birnam Wood, not the Lake District, as was previously reported. I bet you didn't even know Peter Rabbit was as Scottish as Macbeth. Och, but that's an old Entish tale that's still waiting to be told.

Hedgehog by Luke Clennell 1815

All 17 species of hedgehogs worldwide are named after Ireland—Erin, not Scotland or England.

Order:	Erinaceomorpha
Family:	Erinaceidae
Subfamily:	Erinaceinae

Meanwhile in merry olde England, hedgehogs really are an endangered species. Go figure. They have had a long run (er, waddle) of very bad luck crossing the roads ever since Henry Ford got inventive. The cars win every time. Cars: plus 100%. Hedgehogs minus 75%.

Besides, hedgehogs rather look like little scullery brushes scooting across the road. The chickens have a much better track record. They have wings. I don't think we're ready for the idea of winged hedgehogs. So now there are little hedgehog tunnels to help them cross the road to get to the other side. (Don't go toward the light!)

In England, there are hedgehog hospitals for the hedgehog survivors (and the occasional bad-temperred badger) who've had run-ins with lawnmowers and such—St. Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital being the busiest in the world. (Ya can't make this stuff up!)

Hedgehog is from Middle English heyg-hoge, via a circuitous street Latin hericion-em, via the Greek kher, meaning yrchon, or, urchin. An yrchon hab a litel body and many pikes and prikkes. The young are called hoglets. Really.

Since hedgehog was a preferred delicacy of the medieval riche, Chaucer probably ate hedgehog in cameline sauce—whatever that is. The camel part worries me. Some recipes from the Middle Ages called for hedgehog meat puddings studded with slivered almonds. This is how we know what they were called.

Putte hem in a Spete as men don piggys; take a litel prycke, & prykke þe yrchons, an putte in þe holes þe Almaundys….

 (Sounds suspiciously like a haggis recipe.)

According to The People's Cookbook, roasted hedgehog on a spit was an ancient Briton favorite dating back some 8,000 years. Apparently "the meat of a hedgehog is good for lepers" and is also a guaranteed pissy diuretic. Think asparagus.

The English have been coining similes and false syllogisms of man (and knights) with hedgehogs dating back to Anglo-Saxon era. 

Made him with arwis (arrows) ot ther malis most wikke Rassemble an yrchon (hedgehog) fulfilled with spynys thikke. 

They also thought hedgehogs stole apples by rolling home with them in tandem like dunghill beetles. Or that the crafty buggers snuck up on dozing cows to steal milk straight from the teat while they y-slept unawares. Talk about spilt milk.

They say the gypsies still bake them in clay (to remove the spines). They stole children too—especially those street urchins. The gypsies, not the hedgehogs—nor the lepers.

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During the summer of 1989, I was walking the tree-lined backstreets of Cherkassy with a new Soviet friend. As we strolled along the banks of the Dnipr River one sultry evening, we unfolded the good linen stories of our lives—and a hedgehog snuffled across our path. I scooped it up as it tried to waddle away.

Oleg said NO! It was bad luck to pick a hedgehog up, they were "quite disgusting." The same way he spoke of the street tziganii (gypsies). But I wanted to see one up close. 

The hedgehog grunted and snuffled like a little pig and tried to curl into a kootchie ball but he was far too fat. He gave up and stared at me with beady eyes—completely unafraid. Snorfling asthmatically all the while. We eyed each other in the gloaming. The fat hedgehog and I.

It was then my Soviet friend said, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." He told me that hedgehogs could predict the weather. We were in the midst of the great Soviet Thaw. That was pretty big. He said it was an old Ukrainian custom to entice hedgehogs into the garden with saucers of milk, who repay them by eating garden snails and pests.

Alas, the hedgehog had critters of his own nesting between his spines (the hedgehog, not my friend) so I was not willing to hold him for very long for fear of fleas and ticks and lice.

Eventually our luck ran out. Sometimes that is the way of the heart crossing the road late at night. No one to blame but the weather.

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When my grandmother was staring death in the eye, she complained of hedgehogs loose in the living room again.

We put out saucers of milk, just in case.



See Hedgehog Tale Index

Used with kind permission from Alastair Johnston Hedgehog by Luke Clennell is not technically public domain: since i uploaded it, it's in MY domain, but you may link to it, Mo, here's the first page of hedgehog text, it's from Recreations in Natural History, 1815.