HEDGEHOG: garden visitor with a taste for chip shop batter

WHEN it comes to violent yobs wanting to inflict grievous bodily harm on small, defenceless animals, the humble hedgehog is a pricklier proposition than most.

With about 5,000 spines to protect it and the amazing ability to curl itself into a ball, it stands a better than average chance of surving the attentions of a marauding human.

I was quite cheered to read in a recent court case that a hedgehog had been left apparently unscathed after two idiots kicked it around for their own cruel amusement.

The spines cushioning the impact of those kicks are actually hairs which have evolved into defensive spikes, growing to about an inch in length and dropping out annually to be replaced by new ones.

In the wild, foxes and badgers don't have much of a problem preying on young hedgehogs whose spines are not so tough and whose muscles for curling into a ball are not fully developed.

An adult hedgehog is more difficult to tackle but is not totally safe against a badger's powerful claws or the teeth of a sly fox who drops it into water and waits for it to uncurl before launching an attack on its underside. There's something about hedgehogs that makes them quite appealing to most of us.

Perhaps it's because they have short, stubby legs and a rather clumsy, almost comical way, of getting about.

If you ever spot one in the garden, it will probably be rooting about for slugs and snails.

Birds' eggs are another favourite food, when it can reach them.

Thomas Hardy obviously realised you were most likely to see hedgehogs in the summer months when he wrote:"Some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, when the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn."

I saw one a few months ago as I drove down a winding, high hedge-flanked road at about 8pm.

I easily managed to avoid it since it was trundling along the gutter yet I couldn't help but wince at its vulnerability in that environment, spines or not.

The flattened corpses of hedgehogs on our roads have become so numerous that car companies even joke about them in their TV adverts.

At one time, a well-known crisp company even offered 'hedgehog crisps' - not flavoured by hedgehogs at all but withdrawn when the intended joke misfired.

I used to live at a house where a family of hedgehogs visited the patio each night and the big patio windows allowed perfect close-up viewing.

Back then I experimented with a wide variety of tempting fayre, including cat food, which is supposed to put hedgehogs in Hedgehog Heaven.

For some unknown reason, my visitors rather turned their pointy little noses up at this.

But they went potty for something else - the batter off cod bought from the local fish and chip shop.

They tore into this delicacy like demons, actually snorting, raising their spines, and challenging each other to 'bump-bump' fights in their efforts to snap up the smallest scraps.

So entertaining was this behaviour that for a while I put out the batter off my cod quite regularly.

The biggest of the group took to pouncing on the largest piece and dragging it whole towards the bushes.

Unfortunately, cod without batter lacks a certain something and even the spectacle of a hedgehog struggling across the lawn with what looked like a giant hedgehog duvet was not enough to prolong this food source indefinitely.

Later in the year, when temperatures had dropped and the first frosts had decimated plants and flowers, I was shocked to see three puny juvenile hedgehogs wandering miserably around the garden.

There was no doubt what lay in store for them with insufficient fat stores to hibernate and little natural food left.

So I jumped up and found a bucket, aiming to capture them and rear them in the garage.

Sadly, by the time I got outside, they'd vanished.

A day or so later, heavy snow fell.

I never saw them again.