A prickly tale: historian Tom Holland on his quest to save the hedgehog vanishing from London life

The capital’s favourite mammal is on the verge of vanishing from Zone 1 — with a single Regent’s Park outpost remaining. Here, historian Tom Holland reports on his quest to save the hedgehog
Full hog: London’s hedgehogs are under threat due to changes in the enviroment
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Tom Holland30 March 2017

Despite all its concrete and tarmac, London can be a surprisingly hospitable place for wildlife. Foxes nose around in our rubbish bins; peregrines nest in the heights of Battersea Power Station; migratory birds flock to nature reserves like the London Wetland Centre and Woodberry Wetlands.

What, though, of animals who lack the ability of foxes or raptors to negotiate the capital’s roads? For them, London is an altogether less welcoming place – and becoming steadily more so. One species in particular is on the verge of vanishing from Zone One altogether. These are dark days for the animal consistently voted Britain’s favourite mammal. Central London’s hedgehogs are threatened by extinction.

Spring should be a time of hope. This is when hedgehogs across the country emerge from hibernation. With the invertebrates on which they feed coming back into snacking range, they blink, uncurl and start to twitch their noses.

Already this year, we have had the story of one particularly plucky hedgehog who survived an entire winter trapped inside a hay bale. In central London, though, slugs have little to fear. The collapse in hedgehog numbers since the 1970s, when there were still many of them in the heart of the capital, has been precipitous.

Thanks in large part to the increase in traffic over the past four decades, they have vanished altogether from Green Park, Hyde Park and St James’s Park. Today, only one known outpost of hedgehogs remains in central London. Regent’s Park is the site of their last stand.

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It is unlikely, though, that they will be holding out there for much longer. Regent’s Park has the misfortune to adjoin the projected route of the HS2 rail development. The managers of the project have fixed on the car park of London Zoo as an obvious place to park their lorries. That this is directly next to where the Park’s hedgehogs congregate has had a predictably minimal impact on their plans.

Protests from the London Zoological Society and from local MP Tulip Siddiq have come to nothing. Depressingly, it looks as though all the efforts made by the Royal Parks Foundation to help the hedgehogs of Regent’s Park — leaving grassland uncut, carefully monitoring the use of fertilisers — will come to nothing. Central London risks becoming a hedgehog-free zone.

Regent’s Park might serve as a microcosm for what is happening across the whole country. As roads become busier, so the habitats on which hedgehogs depend for survival risk becoming ever more fragmented. This, for an animal that thinks nothing of wandering a mile and more every night in its hunt for food, is a critical threat.

Relative to their size, hedgehogs are prodigious eaters, and risk starvation if they do not enjoy sufficient space for foraging. Small wonder, then, that their numbers should be in free fall across Britain.

Hedging his bets: historian and writer Tom Holland
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Ominous though their decline in cities may be, evidence suggests that it is even more precipitous in the countryside. Londoners who want our hedgehogs to be saved from extinction cannot leave the task to conservationists beyond the M25. There is a job to be done in the capital as well.

So what can we do? The immediate challenge is to find out just how many hedgehogs are left in Greater London. Precise figures, though, are hard to come by. Regular sightings have been made over the past 20 years in three particular hotspots: Richmond, with its large expanses of parkland, Epping Forest and Wanstead Flats.

Elsewhere, though, anecdotal evidence is harder to come by. Nevertheless, it does seem likely that there remain significant pockets across the capital where hedgehogs are still clinging on. In Sydenham Hill Wood, for instance, a three-and-a-half year research project by Emma Pooley, a volunteer with London Wildlife Trust, has monitored paw prints, various dead specimens, and even on occasion filmed hedgehogs out and about on nocturnal perambulations. Who knows — if we only keep our eyes open — where else they might be found?

It is in attempt to answer this question that London Wildlife Trust has set up a website where sightings can be reported, and people can find out what they can do to help: wildlondon.org.uk/hedgehog.

The project is a vital step in securing a future for hedgehogs — and for many other species too — in the capital. As in Regent’s Park, so across Greater London: the greatest threat faced by wild animals is that of habitat fragmentation.

They risk being stranded by roads that are increasingly full of traffic 24 hours a day, marooned on islands of parkland or woodland with no viable means of escape. Hedgehogs may be vanishing from their final outposts in the capital without our even having known they were there. Unless we have a clear sense of where they are, and in what numbers, how can we hope to put practicable conservation measures in place?

Because certainly, armed with the right information, there may indeed be grounds for hope. The clearer a map we get of where hedgehogs in the capital are concentrated, the easier it should become to combat the fragmentation of their surviving habitat.

Again, this is where Evening Standard readers can help. Time was when hedgehogs roamed freely through people’s gardens and allotments. Over the past few decades, though, these have been increasingly closed off and paved over. A London-wide effort to reverse this trend would do wonders for the metropolitan hedgehog.

Small holes can be made in walls and fences; long grass allowed to grow on the edges of gardens; piles of logs or dead leaves left in autumn as sites for hibernation. Already, the charity hedgehogstreet.org is doing wonderful work in fostering these measures on the outskirts of other cities and towns. It is time to see them adopted here in the capital as well — before it is too late.

The sheer scale of London, though, means that hedgehogs are unlikely to flourish here without a co-ordinated attempt to link their habitats together. Councils need to be further encouraged to allow herbaceous vegetation and shrubs to grow along the edges of parks; public utilities to sink tunnels under roads; householders to open gaps in their garden fences.

That is why London Wildlife Trust is sponsoring the provision across the capital of what it calls “hedgehog superhighways”. The ambition ultimately is to ensure that no hedgehog habitat in the city is an island entire of itself. Perhaps, given luck, it will even reach Regent’s Park in time to rescue the hedgehogs there from HS2 before work starts there this year.

Is it worth the effort, some may be tempted to ask. Absolutely it is. We have a duty of care to all the flora and fauna in our country, and no animal better enables us to appreciate that than the hedgehog.

A city that neglects to save its last remaining populations of these enchanting, iconic and authentically wild creatures, at very little cost and inconvenience, will be a city that has lost something of its soul.

It was Philip Larkin, in a poem about a hedgehog accidentally killed by a lawnmower, who best expressed the obligation that we all of us, as Londoners, owe the animals who share this country with us: “We should be kind/ While there is still time.”

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