Page 41 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #04

The Photos by Nick Upton

hedgehog

whisperers

Everyone’s favourite prickly mammal is

vanishing from rural areas, but as Hugh
Warwick
k
Warwick discovers our gardens offer hopediscovers, our gardens offer hope.

ow does a suburban garden end up photos. In the same way that people are shown
with a hoard of hungry hedgehogs pictures of babies, cats or dogs, I tend to be shown
running riot on the lawn? Is it hedgehogs. And at first I was a little worried (I hate
unusual to have five of them at a having to be ‘polite’). I need not have worried:
time gorging on a mixture of pet Nick has captured some amazing images.
food and mealworms? Or to have two But that got me thinking about the garden, the
Hfighting around your feet as you drink people and the surroundings of this wonderful
wine with friends on the patio? As I ponder these array (which is the formal collective noun for
questions, it very quickly becomes clear that this is hedgehogs). What were the Sages doing that was
not just about hedgehogs. so special, if anything? Were they in a wildlife
“We went through 20kg of sunflower hearts in hotspot? And what can the rest of us learn from
December alone,” David Sage tells me as he points this fecund garden?
out the various feeders dotted around his back
garden. It’s in Chippenham, Wiltshire, and not
especially large – just like hundreds of thousands
of others, in fact. On this cold January morning,
the feeders are buzzing with birds. Goldfinches
have control of the bounty at the moment, with
dunnocks picking up the pieces on the ground.
I first heard about David and Jackie Sage’s
garden from the photographer Nick Upton. Nick
and I were queuing for coffee at a conference called
New Networks for Nature when he pulled out
his phone and asked if I wanted to look at some

David and Jackie
check the health of
a hedgehog found
in their garden.