The Gardener's Friend

Forest and Bird, Volume 16, Issue 3, 1 August 1985, Page 34

The Gardener's Friend

Piers Hayman

L: is easy for us to be critical of the early European settlers who brought in all those ‘foreign’ animals and plants. Nowadays we are much more aware of how disastrously simple it is to upset the natural be'ance between one species and another, for we are able to look around us and see the results of past mistakes. Perhaps if we ourselves had been among the pioneers struggling to build a new life in a rough land thousands of miles from home, we too would have been lonely and homesick. Perhaps we would have welcomed, as they did, the introduction of creatures that we knew so well, for it would all have helped to make a strange country feel like home. The lilting song of blackbird and skylark, the cheerful chirp of sparrows, the friendly snuffle of the hedgehog....? Well, perhaps not, but it was for chiefly sentimental reasons that the hedgehog was imported from Britain, the first pair arriving in Christchurch in 1869.

The hedgehog is an old and wily animal whose family dates back some 60 million years. That means that he has been around on this earth much longer than we have, for our first real ancestor, Homo erectus, lived only about 1 million years ago. The hedgehog, therefore, has successfully survived all the changes that have occured over those millions of years, which must mean he is well able to adapt to different and _ varied circumstances. Part of his success must be due to his excellent defence system. He carries more than 16,000 sharp spines on his body and is able to curl himself up when danger threatens into a very unfriendly ball of prickles. This is enough to deter Just about every would-be predator that he might meet in his homelands of Europe and Asia, and it is only very recently in hedgehog history that something has arrived against which his prickles are no defence. Fortunately,

cars and trucks are not found everywhere, so he is only in danger when he is actually on a road himself. New Zealand is the only country where hedgehogs have been successfully introduced. There are none in the Americas, nor Australia, nor any of the other places that have been colonised by Europeans. Most of the early New Zealand importations were to Christchurch and Dunedin, but the hedgehogs soon spread, and by 1910 they could be found all over the lowland areas in the South Island. Their rapid spread was not entirely due to their own efforts. There were many helping human hands, for the hedgehog was a welcome addition to the garden as he ate not only insects and spiders, but slugs and snails, those unwanted visitors that had arrived by mistake along with some of the imported plants. Between 1907 and 1912 hedgehogs were liberated in the North Island as

well, and today you will find them just about everywhere where the conditions suit them. Apparently they do not like it to be too wet, nor too cold, for their distribution as recorded by R. E. Brockie in 1975 showed them to be absent from areas where the rainfall was above 250cm a year, or where there were more than 250 frosts in a year. In the European winter the hedgehog hibernates. He rolls himself into a ball in a pile of dead leaves and goes into a deep sleep until the weather is warmer again.

The reason for this seems to be not so much because he can’t stand the cold, but because there is no food around for him at that time of year. Pet hedgehogs that are fed regularly at the back door, may not hibernate to the same extent as their less fortunate brethren out in the woods. In the winterless north of New Zealand the hedgehog has adapted to the fact that there is a plentiful supply of food all the year round, and may not hibernate at all. Elsewhere, he will spend the colder parts of the year in a —

winter nest, where the brown and white bands of colour on each spine will make him very difficult to spot among the dead grass and leaves. You will not often see hedgehogs, even in the summer, for they prefer to sleep during the day. In England we used to put a saucer of milk out in the evening for the ones that lived in our garden. We were able to get to know them quite well, for hedgehogs are very fond of milk.