About the European Hedgehog
The European Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) is the small, spiny mammal at the heart of European garden folklore — Beatrix Potter's Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Grimm's fairy tales, and now one of the continent's fastest-declining wild animals.
Britain has lost roughly a third of its rural hedgehogs and half of its urban hedgehogs since 2000. The IUCN Red List reclassified the species to Near Threatened globally in 2024, with several national assessments already listing it as Vulnerable.
Habitat & range
Hedgehogs live in a wide range of habitats: hedgerows, woodland edges, farmland, parks, cemeteries and — crucially — connected suburban gardens. A single hedgehog needs to move through 10–20 gardens every night to find enough food and mates.
The biggest habitat problem is fragmentation. Solid fences with no gaps cut hedgehog territories into isolated islands that can't sustain a breeding population.
Diet
Hedgehogs are insectivores. Their diet is dominated by beetles, caterpillars, earthworms, slugs and snails — the animals gardeners most often want gone. A single hedgehog can eat over 100 invertebrates in a night.
They will occasionally take carrion, bird eggs and small vertebrates, but the idea that hedgehogs need bread and milk is a myth: dairy makes them very ill.
Behaviour & life cycle
Hedgehogs are strictly nocturnal, emerging at dusk to forage along familiar routes of 1–2 km per night. They are solitary except during a brief summer mating season and hibernate from November to March in leaf-lined nests under log piles, sheds or dense hedges.
When threatened they roll into a tight spiny ball, protected by around 5,000 modified hairs. Special muscles allow them to hold the ball for hours if needed.
Main threats
The main threats are habitat fragmentation from impermeable fencing, loss of hedgerows and rough field margins, road deaths, slug pellets and other pesticides that poison their food, garden strimmers, and bonfires lit onto piles of leaves where hedgehogs are hibernating.
Taxonomy
- Kingdom
- Animalia
- Phylum
- Chordata
- Class
- Mammalia
- Order
- Eulipotyphla
- Family
- Erinaceidae
- Species
- Erinaceus europaeus
