The Hedgehog Whisperers

Everyone’s favourite prickly mammal is vanishing from rural areas, but as Hugh Warwick discovers, gardens offer hope.

- Hugh Warwick

How does a suburban garden end up with a hoard of hungry hedgehogs running riot on the lawn? Is it unusual to have five of them at a time gorging on a mixture of pet food and mealworms? Or to have two fighting around your feet as you drink wine with friends on the patio? As I ponder these questions, it very quickly becomes clear that this is not just about hedgehogs.

“We went through 20kg of sunflower hearts in December alone,” David Sage tells me as he points out the various feeders dotted around his back garden. It’s in Chippenham, Wiltshire, and not especially large – just like hundreds of thousands of others, in fact. On this cold January morning, the feeders are buzzing with birds. Goldfinches have control of the bounty at the moment, with dunnocks picking up the pieces on the ground.

I first heard about David and Jackie Sage’s garden from the photographer Nick Upton. Nick and I were queuing for coffee at a conference called New Networks for Nature when he pulled out his phone and asked if I wanted to look at some photos. In the same way that people are shown pictures of babies, cats or dogs, I tend to be shown hedgehogs. And at first I was a little worried (I hate having to be ‘polite’). I need not have worried: Nick has captured some amazing images.

But that got me thinking about the garden, the people and the surroundings of this wonderful array (which is the formal collective noun for hedgehogs). What were the Sages doing that was so special, if anything? Were they in a wildlife hotspot? And what can the rest of us learn from this fecund garden?