Ep. 41 – Ecologist Hugh Warwick on loving your hedgehogs

Ecologist, author, and hedgehog advocate Hugh Warwick is leading a national campaign in the United Kingdom to make “hedgehog highways” — 13 centimeter holes in the bottom of fences that allow hedgehogs to move freely among gardens — a legal requirement for new housing developments. Warwick’s Change.org petition that has garnered almost a million signatures and international attention. Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.

European hedgehogs are perhaps the most beloved mammal in the United Kingdom. When the BBC Wildlife Magazine ran a poll a few years back asking readers which species should be the national icon, hedgehogs triumphed. But these endearing, small, strange, slug-munching, spiky creatures — named for their pig-like noses and the hedgerows in which they thrive — are being destroyed across the country that holds them so dear. It’s estimated that Great Britain’s hedgehog population has dropped by 90 to 95 percent since the second world war. Today, there are less than 1 million.

Industrial agriculture has driven the loss of hedgerow habitat that long characterized the British countryside, while farms’ use of pesticides is wiping out the insects that hedgehogs eat. Meanwhile, housing developments are breaking up habitat into smaller and more fragmented parcels, and motor vehicles every year mow down around 100,000 hedgehogs. That’s about one hedgehog in every five nationwide. There are other, smaller threats too that add up, from drowning in uncovered swimming pools to getting caught in litter rubber-bands and fast food cups. In 2020, hedgehogs were listed as vulnerable to extinction in the next twenty years on the Red List for British Mammals. Tragically, they have a lot of company. More than 40 percent of UK species have seen their populations plummet in recent decades.

But while the future of hedgehogs remains precarious, there is grounds for hope. Across Britain, people are turning their love for these creatures into action to try to save them in significant, surprising, and delightful ways. Take the country’s hedgehog highway, for example. Hedgehogs need up to 30 hectares worth of territory — around the size of an 18-hole golf course — to forage for food and find mates, but the average U.K. garden is a tiny fraction of that size. The Hedgehog Street project was launched ten years ago in an attempt to link these habitats by asking homeowners to put 13 inch diameter holes through their garden fences to give hedgehogs the pathways they need to survive. Nearly 14,000 such holes have since been created, linking entire neighborhoods and towns. 

“We live in a landscape that has been turned into a linescape,” writes Warwick in Linescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife. “The hedges, ditches, roads, power lines, canals act as barriers for wildlife. We need to work with the linescapes to reconnect landscapes for wildlife. The habitat fragmentation that these barriers cause is one of the greatest threats to Britain’s wildlife.” Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.

This up-swelling of attention, love, and effort for hedgehogs is thanks in no small part to the contagious enthusiasm, relentless obsession, vision, and passionate career-long commitment of our guest, ecologist and hedgehog expert Hugh Warwick. Warwick has studied, celebrated, written about, and fought to protect hedgehogs and other British wildlife for more than 30 years. He is the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the author of five brilliant books on British fauna, including most recently The Hedgehog Book and Linescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife, which explores the impacts of manmade lines — including hedges, roads, walls, powerlines, and canals — on the ability of wild animals to thrive.

In this episode, we speak with Warwick about why hedgehogs need our help, his role as the spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, the national campaign he is leading to make “hedgehog highways” a legal requirement for new housing, the extraordinary impacts of manmade lines — such as walls, roads, and power lines — on the ability of wild animals to thrive, and the importance of loving your hedgehogs.

“When you look at any landscape, there are linear features all across it,” Hugh Warwick tells us. “In the U.K., our linear features started with the reeves, the hedgerows, and the dry stone walls. We have an amazing network of ditches and drains … Then we’ve got the canals, which briefly were the highways of the country, followed by railways, roads, pylons, and electricity cables. Each of these linear features has an impact on the ability of wildlife to thrive or not.” Photo courtesy of Hugh Warwick.

Hugh Warwick’s recommendations:

The Last Hedgehog by Pam Ayres

In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall

Otter Country and Owl Sense by Miriam Darlington

Wild by Jay Griffiths

Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness by Charles Foster

Old Wow by Sam Lee


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