Tuesday Evening Hedgehogs

I’m struggling for time today.  It’s now 8pm and this is, as usual, the first time I’ve had a chance to check-in and write.  And when I say I’m struggling for time I mean that I’ve not even had the time to think about a single idea for a blog post today.  Not one minute.  I chose the time on the train to read (because it’s a damn fine book) and the rest of my day has been spent fighting off a headsplitting headache.

I’ve just looked on Twitter to see if I could find anything entertaining to share but I’ve come across a sad tweet declaring a poor little young hedgehog has died after several days of a wildlife charity trying to rescue the little spiky fella.  There is a passion for wildlife in this country which I think is unrivalled anywhere else.

We support a local hedgehog charity.  My wife sat for hours last year making pompom hedgehogs that went off to auction with the profits going towards more supplies being bought to help injured or sick hedgehogs.

But the last time I actually saw a live hedgehog must be into the decades.  Part of me hopes that I have a whole array of hedgehogs that come into our garden every night but there is no real evidence to even suggest one might be traversing through.  I’ve tried to make our garden as hedgehog friendly as I can possibly make it.  I’ve got a great big compost heap that I don’t use, every fence has got a gap underneath, I’ve got two water bowls on the ground at each end of the garden.  But I have yet to see one prickly mammal.  I’m not sure what I’m missing.

There are loads of hedgehog charities across the country with incubators and blankets and food.  Who carefully and skillfully try to make sick hedgehogs better.  A lady from one of the local charities painstakingly removed hundreds of ticks after a hedgehog had managed to walk into a tick nest.  It was a grotesque sight.  If that had been me who had come across that hedgehog I’d have been crying and flailing around not knowing what to do.  She didn’t she just got stuck right in and removed all those menacing ticks off the hedgehog, nursed it back to health and released it back into the wild to carry on as before.

That’s the best part about caring for nature, in most cases you get to release the animal or bird back into the wild when all you really want to do is give it a name and call it your new pet (or is that just me?).  We rescued a baby blackbird back in July.  It flew straight into an upstairs window and dropped like a stone to the ground.  Again I was like something out of prime time drama – fearing the worst as the bird wasn’t moving and scared that if it did it would need to be put out of its misery.  But my wife just took charge and told me what to do.  One plastic box and a towel later and the bird slowly came round.  It spent days hopping around the garden before it finally gained the courage to take flight again.  We named him Burt and I made sure he had plenty of food every day before I went to work.  I like to think he flew off to find his own area to live and hopefully find a mate to settle down with.

I appreciate this post hasn’t got me anywhere closer to deciding on my NaNoWriMo project but I got to write about nature for a bit which is always time well spent, I think.

Thank you for reading.