Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the British countryside, hedgehogs aren’t easy to find. That’s partly because the spiky little critters are most active at night, and prefer quiet, undisturbed corners of the landscape, such as hedgerows.
They’re also tough to track, since hedgehogs are pretty tidy travelers. They don’t leave prominent signs behind, such as notable piles of scat or scratches on trees. And they vanish for a solid chunk of the year, hibernating on and off from frost to thaw.But they’re surely there, somewhere—though the latest theory is that there are fewer of them than ever. Lately, many of the hedgehogs that are seen have been mangled by car tires or mauled by badgers. The advocacy group Hedgehog Streets, which encourages people to bore through brick walls to make critter-friendly corridors, estimates that the decline has been steep. Over the past few decades, they say, the hedgehog population has decreased by half in the countryside, and by a third in urban areas. (According to a recent report from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the People’s Trust for Endangered species, the rate of decline does seem to be slowing.)
Precision is as elusive as the hedgehogs themselves, explains Ben Williams, a graduate student in biology at the University of Reading. Some previous studies extrapolated from a fairly small sampling of sites to draw conclusions about the country as a whole, he says, but a few pastures aren’t going to tell you much about forests miles away.
To refine estimates and understand the distribution of Britain’s only prickly mammal, a team led by Williams recently conducted a major hedgehog census. Williams and his collaborators enlisted hundreds of citizen volunteers and university students to help…
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