Hedgehog babies and piano on stairs

Hugh Paxton’s Blog notes that ownership of legally imported and bred Ethiopian hedgehogs makes the idea of hedgehog smuggling utterly redundant. Indeed importing these chaps is redundant. They procreate like…hedgehogs. Quite how they manage it given their robust spiny defences is still a mystery to me.

But they do.

This is the latest addition to the family Hedge and there’s a carpenter living on a stilt house busily constructing a new wooden hedgehog house. A designer house no less. With latrine facilities and moveable walls to prevent robust mating at times when Hedgina might prefer a little private nipple time with her latest hoglets.

Hedgehogs are great fun; they fart, snort, fight, have fun, smell frightful if their domicile is not regularly cleaned and escape through tiny cracks or scale walls. Finding them after they have escaped can involve lengthy nocturnal searches by torch light. As an alternative to watching the latest BBC reports on the (yawn) Arab Spring they are to be commended. But they are a delightful pain in the arse.

Hugh Paxton Blog Ed Note: If your hedgehogs have escaped in your house save yourself the grief. Lie on the sofa and listen. Sooner or later you will hear a snort and will spot a furtive bristly figure doing a run along a wall. They stick to walls. Seize a tea towel. Gotcha!

If they bust out properly from the house then the way to find them is to enlist children. Small ones with acute hearing. They’ll haul them out of the spines, spikes and bushes that border the road. Great Escapes in the hedgehog world tend to group and bunch up.

I am looking forward to the delivery of our hedgehog house. I really am. But the carpenter’s excuses are entirely understood. For the last two months he’s been rebuilding his own house and making it a lot higher to keep himself and family above flood water.

I will tell you more about the trials, tribulations and glories of hedgehogs in my next post.

Cheers!

Hugh

PS If you are wondering about my daughter looking worried by the piano on the stairs – this was a flood photo and we’d moved the piano and one of the hedgehogs had escaped and we caught it and returned it and the piano played on!

pa110429

img 1401

img 1402

img 1403

img 1405

img 1406

img 1412

img 1414

Tags: hedgehogs