Large parts of our garden in France have been turned upside-down. A path divides our main lawn into two halves and while nothing has been touched on the right, the left has become unrecognisable. It is on that left that our extension is being built and so where there was once a lawn there is now a building site with parts dug up, parts littered with piles of bricks, slates, scaffolding and rubble and with the remainder criss-crossed with the ruts from diggers and vans. 

The untouched right side is very different. This side has been carefully protected as for several years it has been home to a hedgehog. She lives in the flower bed, perhaps better described as a hedge which, with its dense bank of shrubs and bushes that runs along a fence for a good twenty metres. The hedgehog first announced herself around three years ago with characteristic hedgehog coughs, grunts and clicks. But it wasn’t till last year that our suspicions were confirmed when twice we saw her walking on the lawn.

Discovering a hedgehog has been a treat for both of us and the idea that she might have adopted our garden as her home, coming back after a night’s hunting, and then each year choosing it as the garden in which to hibernate for the winter, has given us great pleasure. And this summer that pleasure was made that much greater by a very special event – she gave birth to four hoglets!

Soon after we arrived for our summer in Tréguennec the mason, who was part of the team building the extension, beckoned us over. With evident pleasure he showed us videos he had taken from up his ladder of three, perhaps four, hesitant hoglets walking around on the ‘spared’ lawn and popping back into the hedge as and when. He was excited by what he had seen although there was something that he found puzzling ‘Why were these traditionally night-time animals walking around outside their nest in the daylight?’. As an explanation all we could offer was that this was what their mother did! 

Having seen them on film, we then kept seeing them on the lawn for ourselves and over a few days decided there were four; one large, one middling, one small and one very small. From their size and the fact that it was mid-June, we calculated that they were around six weeks old, had just, or would soon, stop suckling, and were now ready to leave home. And so it was.

Soon after sightings stopped, the biggest of the litter was seen in our orchard over 50 metres away; the ‘middling’ one was spotted in the garden of a neighbour a house away, and the larger of the smaller ones, having been picked up as he crossed the road in front of our house, was put in another neighbour’s garden for safekeeping. 

That left the tiny one and things did not go well. One morning we found him just a few metres from the house lying on his side, thin, eyes shut and hardly breathing. We covered him with a blanket but to no avail, on checking a few hours later he was dead. For both of us it was a very sad, even a tearful, outcome. 

It is odd that I am writing this blog just weeks after I wrote about the rescue in London of some other baby animals – four urban foxes. While their rescue was heart-warming, at no time did I feel ‘attached’. Over the generations urban foxes have learned to manage living in their adopted environment – their population is steadily increasing – but in many ways I still view them as struggling scavengers. While it is a pleasure seeing them, I much prefer to watch their country fox cousins running full pelt across harvested fields as I did a week ago in Tréguennec. 

Discovering the four baby hedgehogs in our Tréguennec garden was very different. We watched them venture out and leave home, we identified with the mother and, because of their history, all of them were very much part of our family and to each we grew attached. The mother hedgehog and her four babies have given us enormous pleasure and when faced with the noisy and disruptive building works nearby she could have moved home. As it was, she stayed and without her tolerance we might have seen nothing! 

The illustration shows a photo of the larger of the two smaller baby hedgehog as it explored our garden just before it left.

For helping me write this blog, I would like to thank Momo, Rohan and Vivien.

Footnote: on the afternoon before this blog was published, mother hedgehog came up to the house-end of her hedge and as we had tea she made some very loud grunts. We have assumed that she was trying to say something!