Scientists concerned about plight of hedgehogs

Press, 13 May 1987, Page 32

Scientists concerned about plight of hedgehogs

By

BJORN EDLUND

of Reuters

Bitburg (West Germany) It is a prickly problem — how to prevent extinction by late twentieth-cen-tury motor-vehicles of an animal species that has survived since prehistoric times. A dozen experts, including scientists from Britain, East Germany and the Netherlands, met in Bitburg recently to discuss topics ranging from shelter construction to health care and the potential usefulness of tunnels under busy roads. The object of their concern? The common or garden hedgehog that has outlived the mammonth and the sabre-tooth tiger but is threatened by the traffic on European roads. In West Germany, where authorities have built some 300 tunnels under busy highways to curtail the mass killing of toads, the hedgehog preservation movement has found fertile ground. But migrating toads gather in ponds for mating, so it is relatively simple to plot their routes and place tunnels accordingly. “Unfortunately,” said Friedhelm Kuester, a

Traffic Ministry expert who addressed the First Bitburg Hedgehog Sypmposium, “we have too little knowledge of how hedgehogs move about Scientists did not seriously begin to study hedgehogs until after World War 11.

Pat Morris, of London University, author of- “ Hedgehogs,” a standard work, said the reason for past scientific neglect was simple.

“Hedgehogs are very difficult to find. They sleep nearly half the year, and then only move about at night.” Morris has mapped the nightly wanderings of hedgehogs in a London pdrk. A minute radio tranmitter was mounted on each animal, and luminous dots painted on their backs so that they could be tracked at night without being alarmed.

“They can walk up to a mile in a night.”

He said there has been a noticable drop in hedgehog numbers. While 20 years ago he could collect 20 on a two-day field trip in eastern England, last year he got only three on such an outing. Apart from traffic,

gamekeepers kill them in the mistaken belief that they are a threat'to chicks and eggs of game birds.

Arable land is an unsuitable environment for hedgehogs, so the increase in farming land has contributed to a dwindling of their numbers.

The hedgehog’s primitive bone structure is one of several ways scientists have fixed it as a 15-million-year-old species.

Whereas most other species have developed significantly over the ages, the hedgehog has remained basically unchanged. Hedgehogs exist in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. North and South America have no hedgehogs. They are found in New Zealand only because homesick emigrants brought them here.

Animal lovers, alarmed by the sight of squashed hedgehogs on the road,, have organised campaigns in most European countries to alert drivers to.

the peril posed by cars.

“There is no doubt that hedgehogs are very popular,” Morris said in his address. “I don't know why, because they are not cuddly, are often smelly and have many fleas.” Precise statistics on hedgehog road deaths are hard to come by, but estimates referred to at the conference said some 200,000 are killed every year in West Germany alone. Ah exhibition at the conference bore witness to protection campaigns in The Netherlands, Switzerland, West Germany, Scandinavia and Britain. Car stickers urge slow driving, match boxes bear numbers for “hedgehogs hotlines” to call if you find undersized or injured animals, and posters remind gardeners to check under leaves and sticks for hiberating hedgehogs before starting spring clean-up fires. Among the speakers were several who run hedgehog stations where undernourished animals

are fed. Kuester, whose job at the Traffic Ministry is to make sure road .builders follow environmental guidelines, was presented with a draft road sign — “slow down, hedgehog ahead,” A triangular sign like those used to warn about sharp bends, grazing deer or ambling cows, it showed, ai . smiling hedgehog framed by a bright-red rim. . Sadly, the natural instinct of rolling up in a tight, spiny ball when alarmed, instead of scampering off, does nothing to boost the creature’s survival chances. That instinct has helped hedgehogs outlive other prehistoric . species, but car wheels are not, predators which shy off biting into the spiky globe. But Morris said he was optimistic that they would not become extinct Having adapted well to gardens, hedgehogs will survive as long as there is suburban greenery, he said. , ■ ~