PTES

TV – the street takes off

Hugh Warwick 4 Comments

Hedgehog Street is such a great idea, and when it was launched at the beginning of June we did loads of media and were thrilled with the way it had grabbed the attention. Within a few days there were thousands of people signed up and – in fact as of now there are over 11,000 people who are out there actively helping to improve the lot of the hedgehog. And now, thanks to the politicians taking some time off from their mistresses (what is the male version of a mistress?) to be with their families, there has been a second spate of interest. A week or so back I did an interview with The One Show – a BBC1 sofa-based chat thing that I have never watched. I had a few hours, on returning bleary eyed from five days at the wonderful Buddhafield festival, to make my wildlife friendly garden seem more suitable for the non-human wildlife (this required putting the superfluous toys and bikes in the neighbour’s garden). The interviewer (forgotten her name already, must get a brain) teased me about the state of the place, piles of prunings gradually being munched by minibeasties, but it all seemed to go well. She was then off to interview Laura from the PTES and get an idea of how best to link up all the wildlife friendly gardens – the key to Hedgehog Street.

Then today I was back with the wonderful Sue Kidger in Twickenham to be interviewed for the Right/Write/Wright Stuff on Channel 5 (which one is right?). Great fun, camera operator Rosie ended up covered in hedgehog poo and having a little hoglet named after her – assistant David took a photo of me performing for the camera.

And I got photos of the hedgehogs performing for camera too …

And my first half decent photo of a hedgehog self-annointing.

So all in all a very successful day. As yet we have no idea when the pieces will make it to air, but I will let you know when I do.

In the news

Hugh Warwick Leave a comment

This is just a very quick round up of some of the coverage we have managed to get for the launch of Hedgehog Street campaign and also the report, the State of Britain’s Hedgehogs.

1st June was launch day and we had pieces in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. Then there was the radio blitz, I did the breakfast show on BBC Wales, then BBC West Midlands followed by a manic cycle ride to the BBC studios in Oxford. But that was nothing compared to what others got up to. Fay at the BHPS did three interviews I think and Laura at the PTES had the joy of sitting in a studio and being pinged around the country, doing 13 local radio stations, one after the other.

The night before the launch I was asked to write something for the Guardian website, as part of Comment is Free – and thank goodness for Harry Potter, as my two children watched half an episode while I wrote it after dinner. It emerged on the Guardian website around lunch time and by the next morning (as I am writing) was still on the front page and had stimulated such a debate that there were 175 comments – mostly from people sympathetic to hedgehogs (though there were a few offering recipe tips).

Then this morning, well, I had forgotten I had been interviewed by a journalist from the Independent a week or so ago … not sure if I sound entirely sane in this piece, but great to see my old friend Sue in there too.

There have been a host of re-postings, and local media interest too, so the story is out there. Which feels like something of a triumph. I have played this ‘game’ many times before, but rarely with such success – and while this was undoubtedly down in part to the wonderful pr team at Firebird (thanks Jane) it is also down to luck … if bin Laden had been shot yesterday, we would not have had a fraction of the attention; if another footballer had been caught with his injunctions around his ankles, we would have been lost.

The last time I helped launch a hedgehog story on the world the UK government, without a whisper to anyone else, released a hedgehog-related story the day before … and we were sunk … the media are happy to cover tittle-tattle day in day out, delighted to revel in economics and way without fatigue, but hedgehogs? Can’t do them too often … people would get bored …

Well, I would disagree with that idea … bored of hedgehogs? Never!

Hedgehogstreet

Hugh Warwick 15 Comments

Perhaps the biggest hedgehog story for some time, and I am in the thick of it. Today, 1st June, we are launching ‘Hedgehog Street‘. And, as Melvyn Bragg is so keen on saying as he befuddles audiences on In Our Time (one of my favourite radio programmes), now I ought to ‘unpack’ that a little.

The British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species have been working together for many years, but this is our biggest effort yet. In the past we have developed projects such as HogWatch and we also support the rather unfortunate Mammals on Roads surveys (unfortunate because it relies on the murderous rampage of the motor car to help us monitor fluctuations in the hedgehog population).

What these projects have revealed is alarming. But we wanted to check that the serious decline in hedgehog numbers was ‘real’ and not just a quirk of the way the data were collected. So we employed some of the best ecological statisticians at the British Trust for Ornithology (I know, they do birds, but they also do numbers REALLY well) and they used our figures along with data they had collected. From this we can unequivocally state that in the last ten years, the hedgehog population of Britain has declined by around 25%.

This is alarming. The hedgehog is an excellent indicator of the state of our environment, it is also a wonderfully robust creature that has managed to fit brilliantly into our world. So what has changed? And what can we do about it?

The answer is something I have been banging on about for years. Habitat fragmentation.

At its most obvious, this would be a busy road being built through an area of hedgehog habitat. Hedgehogs would then be unable to get from one side to the other. But fragmentation is far more insidious. It happens in the rural landscape because fields get bigger and hedges remain unmanaged. It is exacerbated by the increase in badgers, the presence of which prevents hedgehogs moving along the remaining hedgerows. And it happens in the last refuge of the hedgehog, suburbia.

In A Prickly Affair, I wrote about the suburban doughnut … the circle of rich hedgehog territory that surrounds the desert its heart. But this doughnut of interconnected gardens is also being fragmented. Obviously, busier roads make a hedgehog’s life harder. But so does infill development, so does the destruction of wildlife friendly gardens with extensions, decking, patios and car-ports. And so do fences with concrete footings. You might have the very best hedgehog friendly garden in the city – and I have had this question asked of me many times – but no hedgehogs. Well, if they cannot get into your garden, they will not appear.

And this is where Hedgehog Street comes in. This innovative project has been set up to help us all recreate a mosaic of interconnected habitats in suburbia. There is an information pack with all the details, the website also has top tips, but what it comes down to is the simple fact that if we open out our gardens to hedgehogs by allowing them to move between them, we massively increase their chances of survival.

The figures are amazing, there are around 433,000 hectares of garden and if we could get just 0.1% of them involved, that would create a hedgehog refuge larger than Sherwood Forest!

So log on to Hedgehog Street, get your pack and get active – and don’t forget to share the fun, post your stories on the forum, get local media interest (this will be on SpringWatch soon) and get out there with a saw and a sledgehammer!

So there is plenty we can do, but there is one fact that this analysis of historic data has thrown up that shook me to my core. The population estimate for hedgehogs in Britain in 1950 was around 30 million. In 1995 it was about 1.5 million. Now, probably nearer one million. That is less than 5% of the 1950 figure. That means we have lost over 95% of our hedgehogs in just 60 years. Please re-read that sentence. It is possible that the original figure is an over-estimate. But, say, it is double what was really out there, that would still mean we have a 90% population decline on our hands.

This leads me to something else that has been bothering me for sometime. It is the idea of ‘shifting baselines’. We are worried about the substantial decline we are aware of – and there is no denying how serious it is – but this is a quite small decline compared to what we have already lost. Shifting baselines kick in when we make assessments about the state of populations based on the knowledge that we personally have. So my idea of a healthy population of hedgehogs will be heavily influenced by my early memories of abundance. That memory acts as a baseline from which I now look in distress at the current population level. But the situation is far worse than that as my baseline is drawn from an already devastated population. And this is true for everything. There is simply far less wildlife out there than there was. And the reason is because we have killed it or we have destroyed the habitat necessary for it to flourish.

This is something to feel sadness and anger about, but it is vital we do not let that beat us into submission. I know many people think my passion for hedgehogs a little eccentric, but the truth is, it is a passion for all wildlife, and the message the hedgehog tells us now is one we must heed. Remember – we might have already lost 95% of the country’s hedgehogs. Grieve, then act; give the hedgehogs a treat.

CSI Hedgehog

Hugh Warwick 1 Comment

I have just met a team straight out of the Crime Scenes Investigator series that is begging to be made – CSI Hedgehog.

How did that hedgehog die?

For most of us, the only sight we get of a dead hedgehog is flat on the road. The staple of many jokes …

Why did the hedgehog cross the road? To see its flat mate.

Why did the hedgehog cross the road? To show he had guts.

Why did the hedgehog cross the road, jump up and down in a muddy puddle and return to the same side? Because it was a dirty double crossing hedgehog.

Already we have been learning so much thanks to these sacrifices to our need for speed – it is one of the most reliable techniques for assessing presence and absence of hedgehogs in an area. And when repeated, year after year, as it is with the Mammals on Roads project run by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, it can give us an idea of how populations of hedgehogs are fluctuating. It does not tell us how many there are, but it does tell us if they are increasing or decreasing, as there has yet to be any evidence of hedgehogs learning to avoid cars.

But now there is another way in which unfortunate corpses can assist our understanding of the wonderful world of the hedgehog.

The team of Crime Scenes Investigators will be on hand to undertake meticulous studies of the insides of hedgehogs that have been found dead in people’s gardens. These animals will be a ‘silent witness’ to the environment in which they lived. The experts, Katie Conville, Becki Lawson along with team leader Andrew Cunningham, from the Zoological Society of London, will try and work out not just what killed the animal, but also what sub-lethal effects were at play.

Parasitology, virology and bacteriology will all help to uncover the infectious diseases that have left the hedgehogs ill at ease. And they will also, when there is evidence to warrant, investigate what manmade chemicals might be lurking, undermining the health of our slug-munching friends.

This is not just about the fate of individual hedgehogs – there is also the potential to uncover what has been causing the decline in hedgehog numbers around the UK. This sort of work has already uncovered the cause of the mass mortality of greenfinches, as well as uncover the truth behind frog deaths and cetacean strandings.

But, as ever, there is an issue of money – so if anyone is reading this and feels particularly flush, drop a line to the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (or remember them in your will) – and maybe we can have our very own CSI hedgehog!!