The Hedgehog's Dilemma: A Tale of Obsession, Nostalgia, and the World's Most Charming Mammal

Until I saw a picture of newly born porcupines, I never thought about how they could be born with bristles. Ways to get rid of their smell was about the only thing I gathered from a movie about the spiky animals. While the first two chapters tell us about the ways of hedgehogs, the drama does not start until the third chapter where the hedgehogs are about to be shunned as bird population destroyers. Having heard calls of stilts at the sight of feral cats, I can imagine the havoc created by people about hedgehogs as culprit. The author with his radio tracking for previous study, paint blotting for identification and counting saved them from the fate of dangers of rounding up by a factor of 10. It is interesting to note that different rules apply to three legged animals released back into the wild after rehabilitation based on the role of the foot in feeding and keeping clean.

You may spout any praise of America, but you cannot conceal the fact: America has no hedgehogs. Not native ones, anyway. Oh, we have hedgehog hobbyists who enjoy having imported hedgehogs as pets, and even have them compete in the International Hedgehog Olympic Games (the Olympic Committee who runs the human version wants you to be sure they do not themselves sponsor or endorse the hedgehog version). Writer Hugh Warwick attended the IHOG one year, but competitive or domesticated hedgehogs are not his passion. Hedgehogs, the wild sort familiar to anyone in Britain, are what he favors, and he makes a convincing case for his enthusiasm in _The Hedgehog's Dilemma: A Tale of Obsession, Nostalgia, and the World's Most Charming Mammal_ (Bloomsbury). Warwick is a British freelance writer and photographer who covers environmental issues, and it seems he has spent half his life studying hedgehogs. The other half must have been spent addressing members in meetings of that venerable British foundation, the Women's Institute, his favorite audience. (He praises the WI as the bakers of "some of the finest cake known to humanity," and is happy to take a cake to cover travel expenses.) It is these talks that got him asking himself, "Why hedgehogs?" After all, he finds that other hedgehog enthusiasts (and they are legion) have trouble putting their fingers on the attraction of hedgehogs: "smelly, flea-ridden, solitary, prickly, and nocturnal, they are hardly the recipe for unrestrained, or even restrained, love." His talks to the Women's Institute must have brought out his own charming and jocular side, always on view in this book, which is memoir, history, and field guide. He is a trained ecologist whose first professional involvement with hedgehogs was for his university degree thesis, tracking hedgehogs in Devon. He was doing the same work twenty years later on a little Orkney island, North Ronaldsay. Although the island was tiny, there were reports that there were 10,000 hedgehogs on it, and they were putting at risk the survival of ground-laying birds by eating their eggs. Yes, hedgehogs eat eggs from ground nests, but were they the villains? Tagging and counting once again showed that there were actually about 500 hedgehogs, and further research showed that climate change was forcing plankton northward, so that the sand-eels that fed on it had to go northward, and the sand-eels were the birds' food, and that was a bigger hazard. Ecology is messy. Hedgehogs have from time to time been considered vermin or were used for food. (Lest you think Warwick is too reverential toward his subject, he does include a recipe for hedgehog spaghetti carbonara - one hedgehog serves four - but adds that the chef who invented the recipe specializes in cooking roadkill.) The greatest change in feeling toward hedgehogs occurred in 1905, the year Beatrix Potter brought out _The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle_. Her heroine captured a true part of the character of real

I loved this book. I bought it because a good friend, a lifelong petless woman, is totally gaga over her pet pygmy hedgehog, and I just couldn't understand their appeal (being partial to the usual cats and dogs myself). But this book is not a primer on hedgehogs, as such. The book is a funny, informative, sensitive love story of the author and hedgehogs. The author is a professional biologist, and his description of how he started researching hedgehogs will either scare you off biology and wildlife watching forever, or it endear you to it forever. I learned a lot about how both hedgehogs and biologists go about their business in nature. Neither is as glamorous as you might think but both are very interesting. I recommend it for anyone interested in hedgehogs, field biology, ecology, or the scrappy intersection of nature and humans. I also loved his treatment of hedgehog carers and rescuers.

THE HEDGEHOG'S DILEMMA: A TALE OF OBSESSION, NOSTALGIA, AND THE WORLD'S MOST CHARMING MAMMAL is a funny and appealing quest to discover what makes hedgehogs so appealing. Environmental writer Hugh Warwick here tracks hedgehogs around the world, considering pet-keepers, zoos, rare Chinese breeds, and much more. The blend of natural history and travelogue makes for a whimsical, fun title appropriate for any general-interest lending library.

Few mammals can spark warm and sentimental feelings quite as quickly as the hedgehog, and Hugh Warwick has penned an utterly charming book that absolutely captures their appeal. I really can't say how much I enjoyed this book -- it was a light, interesting read that was peppered with Warwick's wry sense of humor as he described everything from chasing hedgehogs across the English countryside as an undergradute biologist to his introduction to the American Hedgehog Olympics. Warwick writes with the heart of a poet and the eye of a scientist. His passion for hedgehogs is tempered with his understanding of where they fit in their ecosystems, and this charming book also carried with it a very real warning about the warning bells being set off by the environment. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.