Spring is here and creatures are stirring. Hedgehog expert Hugh Warwick on the strange myths and enduring fascination of the spiny insectivore

The British Library popped up a lovely piece of animation called De Herinacio, or “on the hedgehog”, on a blog posting last week [in December 2014]. The film, with a narration read out in Latin, is based on the stories repeated in many ancient bestiaries of how a hedgehog collects food for its young, and also for the winter.

The images were stimulated by the Rochester Bestiary of 1230, see above – but with a story credited to the much earlier Greek text of the Physiologus. A later Latin text (and commentary for the animation) runs as follows: “The Physiologue says that a hedgehog has the shape of a suckling piglet. On the outside it is entirely covered with spines. During the grape-gathering season the hedgehog enters the vineyard. And when it sees a good grape, it climbs up the vine and removes that grape in such a way as to make all the clusters fall onto the ground. Then it climbs down and rolls itself over them so that that all the grapes get caught in its spines. This is how it brings food to its offspring.”

The story goes back further, though. Pliny the Elder in the 1^st century CE described how the hedgehog would collect fallen fruit on its spines and return to a hollow tree and that a clever man could predict the weather by seeing which entrance the hedgehog blocked up. This story was in turn taken from Aristotle’s The History of Animals from 350 BCE.

These stories are, of course, utter balls. But a fascinating insight into the longevity of things that simply are not true.

How can I be so bold in dismissing the wisdom of these great minds? Because after nearly thirty years of study and the writing of two books on hedgehogs I feel pretty confident that this fruit gathering has never happened. Hedgehogs don’t eat fruit. This means a fallacy has retained considerable traction for two thousand years.

To be fair, there is a good reason why the myth would have arisen. Fallen fruit attracts hedgehog food, macroinvertebrates. So hedgehogs will congregate around the clusters of rotting fruit and might even seem to be eating it, when in fact they are eating the bugs feeding on the fruit. And possibly, just possibly, a ripe piece of fruit did once land on the spines of a hedgehog. But if you are tempted to repeat the experiment you will find a problem. A happy hedgehog has relaxed spines, lying flat. These will not capture a falling plum. An unhappy hedgehog will have spines erect. These might capture a ripe grape or pear – but as soon as our hedgehog starts to wander off, the fruit will slip off.

The myth persists in relics – my favourite is not from a bestiary though. The 14^th century New College Chapel, Oxford, I had been told, has a hedgehog carved into one of the misericords. Clearly I had to explore, but not before a meeting with the fantastic Epstein monumental statue of Lazarus. I have it on good authority that his left knee is the must touch destination for sightless visitors to Oxford – and it is extraordinary. Cool, smooth and hand sized.

Working from the door, clockwise, I started to peer under each of the misericords. They contained the most startlingly pagan images, green men, monsters, leaves and castles. The hedgehogs (there were two) did not appear until I was three-quarters of the way around – and I have since been asked to wait until Evensong has finished before I try it again.

No one has been able to explain why there is a female centaur, with an axe, in between the two vine-tangled hedgehogs. As with much of the iconography of this fascinating animal, the stories are lost. For example, in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum there is a fantastic blue ceramic hedgehog from Ancient Egypt – a culture that had a great fondness for the animal, if the many artefacts left behind are any indication.

While we may have a better understanding of what hedgehogs get up to, none of the magic has gone and they remain deeply embedded in our popular culture. Which is good. As now, more than ever, they need us to care. UK population is down 37% in just the last ten years.

Hugh Warwick is an author and ecologist. His books include A Prickly Affair (Penguin, 2008) and Hedgehog (Reaktion, 2014). You may visit his website at www.urchin.info

This blog was first published in 2014.

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