Did you know that a group of hedgehogs is called a prickle of hedgehogs? How clever is that! It’s also called an array of hedgehogs, but that is not as fun or clever as a prickle of pricklys (second part naturally being a Crystalism).

While parked up with the lovely Moni (see post http://www.acookonthefunnyside.com/content/farewell-friends-%E2%80%93-now ), we discovered a sweet baby hedgehog, completely abandoned by his prickle of prickly friends, living in the shrub next to the vans. It’s amazing how much noise such a tiny creature makes. Noise might be a slight exaggeration, but you can hear them eating and moving about.

We were worried that our new found Mr Prickles was too small to survive, and why wasn’t he in hibernation we asked? But according to the ever clever wiki, they don’t all hibernate especially when the weather is good (yes it is!) and there is food available. We decided to help here (in a hedgehog friendly fashion of course).

Moni got an egg and we gave it to him (no idea if he’s a boy or if we have now confused him) as I remembered that we have a big hedgehog on our farm and he loves eggs. I didn’t realise this at first and left him quite happily in the duck house, but we started to notice that all the ducks eggs were being eaten by something… Yes, Daddy Prickles was helping to keep the duck population down.

We encouraged him to find other living quarters and other sources of food for several reasons. One, I too eat duck eggs thank you very much, secondly, I love ducklings, and thirdly, it was far too rich for him as hedgehogs suffer from fatty liver disease and heart disease! Whoever would have thought that!? But our baby was in need of pepping up and he happily and noisily munched the egg.
For more interesting info, here is the wiki link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog