The hedgehog was found at two in the afternoon on the eleventh of November, moving slowly across a lawn in open daylight. The person who found her did the right thing within about ninety seconds of looking her up: she put on gardening gloves, lifted the hedgehog into a high-sided cardboard box with a towel, put the box somewhere quiet and warm, and phoned a wildlife rescue.
The hedgehog weighed 284 grams. She would not have survived the winter.
There is a rule of thumb in hedgehog rehabilitation that is unusually clear-cut for wildlife work, and rehabilitators would like it far more widely known: a hedgehog out during the day, at any time of year, needs help. Hedgehogs are strictly nocturnal. A daytime hedgehog is sick, injured, dehydrated, poisoned, or a mother displaced from a nest. There is no benign version.
The autumn version has a second layer. Hedgehogs need sufficient fat reserves to hibernate, and the widely used minimum is around 450 to 600 grams depending on region and the length of the local winter. Below that, an animal that goes into hibernation simply doesn't come out. Underweight juveniles born late in the year — "autumn orphans" — are the single largest category of hedgehog admissions in Britain and much of northern Europe.
"She was a September litter, almost certainly," said Wren Alcott, who runs the Fernhollow Hedgehog Trust out of a converted garage and took the call. "Beautiful animal, wrong month. If she'd been born in June she'd have been fine."
Her intake found a heavy tick burden, a lungworm infection confirmed on a faecal sample, and moderate dehydration. That combination is typical rather than unlucky: lungworm is close to universal in wild hedgehogs and becomes clinically significant when the animal is already compromised. She was warmed slowly on a heat pad set to one side of an enclosure, so she could move off it, rehydrated with subcutaneous fluids, treated with a wormer over five days, and started on a diet of high-protein wet food.
She gained weight at roughly eleven grams a day. By mid-January she was 690 grams, and by late February she was ready to go back out — deliberately overwintered awake indoors, which is standard practice for animals admitted below hibernation weight.
The release matters as much as the treatment. She went back within a few hundred metres of where she was found, at dusk, into a garden whose owners had been briefed: a supplementary feeding station with meaty cat food and water for the first two weeks, a log pile and a purpose-built hedgehog house for shelter, and — the item Alcott raises first every time — a thirteen-centimetre gap cut in the base of the fence on both sides of the garden.
"A hedgehog needs about a hectare of connected habitat," she said. "Modern fencing has turned a lot of neighbourhoods into a series of sealed boxes. If you do one thing after reading this, cut a hole in your fence and tell your neighbour to cut one in theirs."
Her other list is what not to do while you wait for a rescue to call back. Never give a hedgehog cow's milk or bread, which cause serious digestive illness. Don't put it back outside "to see if it perks up." Don't bathe it. Don't feed mealworms as a staple, which cause metabolic bone disease. A towel, a warm quiet box, a shallow dish of water, and a phone call is the entire correct protocol.
