Self-Anointing

a strange hedgehog behaviour!!

Watch this video - and then I can start … for those unable to watch just now, here is a description:

photograph of a self-anointing hedgehog taken by my friend and mentor Dr Pat Morris

Night time in the garden, a trail camera has been set up to spy on the neighbourhood goings on (thank you Susan Robinson for passing this on to me) … a male hedgehog is seen intently sniffing and licking at a dark patch on the patio floor …

Ok - two things - first, how do I know it is a male hedgehog? In the video you can see he has a visible ‘tummy button’. That is not a tummy button.

And secondly, Susan has revealed the care with which she manages her garden, creating lovely shallow steps for hedgehogs!

Back to the video - the licking is serious and then he goes into what looks like a bit of a spasm, stretching, contorting, and then just toppling over.

So what is happening? Could that have been some fast acting poison? Not at all - Susan tells me that she had seen a female hedgehog urinate just at that spot earlier.

This is a hog getting high on wee!! The contortions continue and this time you can see a mouthful of frothy saliva with which he is coating his spines.

This is classic self-anointing behaviour. I have seen it on a few occasions - in the wild and in captivity - and it has been thought about and discussed for many years by researchers. And what we can conclude is that we still do not know quite why they do this wonderfully weird thing!

There are plenty of theories - but none are complete and all-explaining. For example, it tends to be stimulated by a strong scent or flavour. So maybe it is then being used to coat the hedgehog spines in that scent to act as a disguise? Well, if you have ever spent time with a hedgehog you will know they have a distinct odour and no amount of lapped up wee is going to cut through that!

While it has been reported to be stimulated by chewing on cigar-butts or being held in the hands of someone who has recently used strong soap, it has also been stimulated by distilled water.

One night out with Nigel (one of the hedgehogs I was radio-tracking in Devon for a study looking at the survival of youngsters taken into a rescue in the autumn, and then released into a totally new environment in the spring) - well, actually I had finished my radio-tracking, it would have been around 0400 and I had stepped out of my rickety caravan to clean my teeth. And there, looking up at me was Nigel.

me a very long time ago in a field far away … taken by Dr Pat Morris

By this stage in the study I had begun to be able to recognise individuals by appearance and behaviour, as well as the little radio-transmitters on their back. Nigel was the most accepting of hedgehogs - while some would do the traditional freeze and roll, and others would sense it was me and just scarper (that made life harder), Nigel just carried on being a hedgehog!

As he wandered away from me - no hurry or stress - I popped the toothbrush in my pocket and followed. He went out onto the single track lane that ran by the field I was in … all the mod cons - there was a tap and a hedgerow … and started to snuffle along the verge.

a glimpse of me at work in my caravan - again, thanks to Pat Morris

It was clear how vulnerable he was, and I was for that matter as I lay down to get a closer look - for the first vehicle that he would encounter on there would likely be the last. Fortunately I was alert to any sounds of impending doom (and would have scooped him up if I had heard the throb of an engine).

He was grabbing invertebrates from the verge - I imagine this was a deliberate strategy on his part. The road was easy and dry to walk along, and the verge would have been filled with animals seeking the relative warmth of the road. Mostly it was tiny slugs - oh, there are some people who argue aggressively that hedgehogs don’t eat slugs … in much the same way people argue that the world is flat … Nigel happened upon a bigger slug, still only a couple of centimetres long - and he dragged it out into the road, scraping it across the surface in what seemed to be a successful attempt to remove some of the slime. He then ate it, noisily, before contorting into a self-anointing frenzy!

Another hedgehog - this time from a rescue - gave a fascinating performance but not in the most helpful of ways. I was being filmed in the evening to talk about the release of hogs from the rescue - this one was about to be let loose. To get the interesting footage the rehabber placed the hog on her lawn, that was also shared by her chickens …. And dear hedgehog, what would make for a more delightful photograph than the result of you chomping on chicken poop and then smearing it across your spines!!

Anyway - it is fascinating behaviour - have you witnessed it? What was it stimulated by? I would love to hear your stories!

And I write about Nigel and the other hedgehogs I was radio-tracking in my first book ... A Prickly Affair ... just in case you have not read it yet!!