We groggily woke up this morning to the symphony of a dog barking. My mom’s here for the week and let Mushu out so we could (try to) sleep in. I came downstairs to see what was up and she had corralled him back inside because there was “something” out on the patio.
Sure enough, curled under the patio table was a bundle of spines the size of a mini watermelon. It was a hedgehog (and a darn big one at that!). The previous owner of our place had told us they were around, but this was our first sighting.
The problem was that a paving stone patio is decidedly not good hedgehog habitat. And 7:00am in the morning while the sun is out is definitely not when a hedgehog should be around. The little creature seemed lethargic and not particularly well.
I then tried to figure out what exactly you do with a potentially unwell protected species covered in pokey bits. After a few quick emails with the absolutely wonderful folks at Wildlife Rescue Cork I got connected to a volunteer who would meet me later in the day in a town 30 minutes away so that the critter could get to their wildlife clinic.
In the meantime I (carefully) picked the not-so-little guy up and put him in a box with a towel and some food and water. Said box then got tucked into one of the gated outbuildings on the property so that Mushu wouldn’t cause him further stress.
When it was time to leave I popped back out, except, no hedgehog. He’d used the intervening hour to eat some food, climb out of the box, and stash himself away behind a wooden kennel in the space. Clever little dude! Despite the relative flurry of activity, he still seemed in ill health so I put him back in his box, then put that inside a larger box (this one with a lid), and put that box into the passenger seat of the car.
What followed was a disconcerting 30 minute drive as the hedgehog futzed around in his boxes. It was hard not to feel like it was a scene from Jurassic Park and that a little dinosaur was going to crawl out and spew venom in my face while screaming at me. When I parked he was midway through an escape attempt, so we arrived just in time.
I got to Bandon and met a man named Jesús who I handed the hedgehog to in the Lidl parking lot. This is not a sentence I expected to write in my life. On opening the box he said, “Oh it’s a big one…” and we carefully transferred things into his own box for the onward journey. Let’s hope the critter recovers to full health!
