Part 3

Only animals that are very hungry will attack the Hedgehog, and then the young are preferred if available. Gipsies, Foxes, and Badgers appear to be his principal enemies. The Fox is said to have a special and disgusting method of making the Hedgehog unroll when he is on the defensive; and a writer in The Field some years ago stated that when caught by the Badger the Hedgehog utters a pitiful wail, though he will permit himself to be torn to pieces by a terrier without a cry.

The male and female are known respectively as Boar and Sow, to carry out the idea that they are a lesser kind of pig. Though the males are very quarrelsome among themselves, they have the domestic virtue and mate for life. Some time between the end of June and the end of August, the female produces a litter of four to seven blind and helpless young, sparsely clad with pale, flexible spines, and the ears drooping. The spines gradually stiffen and become first dull grey, then brown and ringed with three bands, of which the middle one is dark and the others light. The spines are arranged in radiating groups, surrounded by coarse harsh fur. Normally, these spines lie flat upon the body, but can be erected at will. They cover the entire upper surface with the exception of the short conical head and stumpy little tail--which is shorter even than the short rounded ear. The head and underside are clothed with harsh fur of a dirty brown or dirty white colour. In Devon and Cornwall it is known as Furze-a-boar. It expresses its feelings by means of a quiet grunt; the youngsters by a squeak.

The adult male Hedgehog is about nine and a quarter inches in measurement of head and body, and the tail is a little over an inch; the female is less than the male by about three-quarters of an inch. In relation to its entire bulk--it weighs one and a half pounds--the neck and body are said to be shorter than in any other British mammal. The eyes are bright and prominent. The legs are so short that the body but little more than clears the ground in walking. Both hand and foot has five clawed toes, and five pads on the sole.

The sharply pointed spines are about three-quarters of an inch in length. They are quite hard, and have from twenty-two to twenty-four longitudinal grooves. They have a hemispherical base above which is a narrow neck sharply bent, so that the spine is almost at right angles with the base.

When attacked the Hedgehog has the skunk-like habit of emitting a highly objectionable odour in order to disgust its assailant.

We have never tried Hedgehog-meat as food, but several well-known men have testified to its excellence when cooked gipsy-fashion--in a crust of clay.

The dentition of the Hedgehog is i 3/2, c 1/1, pm 3/2, m 3/3 = 36.

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With the Hedgehog we make our acquaintance with the order Insectivora, which is represented in Britain by five species only: the others being the Mole and three Shrews. In many respects they are similar to the Rodentia, but the incisor teeth have not the chisel-shape of the latter, and the molar teeth instead of having grinding crowns have them developed into pointed eminences more suited for piercing the chitinous armour of beetles, etc. The skeleton is furnished with clavicles or collar-bones. There are five toes on each of the feet, furnished with claws, and the animal walks on its soles. Our native species represent three distinct families: Erinacidæ (Hedgehog), Talpidæ (Mole), and Soricidæ (Shrews).

*Mole* (Talpa europæa, Linn.).

However slight may be their personal acquaintance with the Mole himself, his engineering work is only too evident to every possessor of a garden. He may, perchance, live in a neighbour's land, but from time to time we shall find some morning that he has driven a tunnel right across the lawn or the tennis-court, marring its hitherto fair surface with an ugly ridge and at intervals a little heap of raw earth. If we are sufficiently self-controlled to dissemble our inward rage, we may get some countervailing good out of the calamity. If we bring a garden chair and sit quietly within range of the newest heap, our quiet watching may be rewarded by a sight of the clever little engineer, and we may be restrained from throwing stones at him by the thought that he is seeking to reduce the number of those worm-casts on the lawn that have always annoyed us so.

If the tunnelling work is not yet completed, we shall see a heaving of the fresh heap of soil, and after a short interval the sharp, black snout of the Mole will be pushed up from the centre to sniff the air and ascertain if it is safe for him to make a fuller appearance. Satisfied that it is so, he exhibits his shoulders and the broad shovel-shaped hands with which he has accomplished all this navigator's work. Now he is right out, even to his ridiculous little tail, and so to speak swimming over the turf--for he cannot walk on his forefeet, the hands being set sideways for his shovelling work.

Why has he come up? We can only surmise that he is satiated with the luscious earthworms and beetle grubs that live under our lawn, and is looking around for some more substantial fare--a dead bird or mouse, perhaps, for he is by no means averse from picking bones for a change, though his structure makes it impossible for him to catch any of the vertebrates alive, but he can kill and eat a smaller or weaker Mole, and has been reported to attack birds, lizards, frogs, and snakes; he will not touch vegetable food. His appetite is almost insatiable, and there is little substance in his underground fare, which impels him ever to increase his sources of supply by boring fresh runs. There! your movement alarmed him, and he has dived to earth again in the soft mould of the border.

It is not only in the garden that we may see the Mole and his work. He is perhaps more active in the meadow and the cornfield, where he has a wider range for his long straight main run and the side runs that branch off from it. In either of these places he is actually much more of a nuisance than in our garden--difficult though it may be for the garden-owner to realise this. When the hay or the wheat has to be reaped the lines of hillocks across the field are an impediment to the reaping machines. So the farmer has to set traps to minimise the nuisance as much as possible. When these are of the bent hazel rod and noose variety we may find the trapped Mole swinging from the rod that has straightened itself, and can then indulge in a close inspection of his form and structure. In pasture-land the mole-hills often appear to occupy more space than the intervening surface.

The velvet-clad body is cylindrical, with the forelimbs set well forward opposite the short neck. The long muzzle is blunt-pointed and terminated by the nostrils, which are close together. His eyes are mere points that have to be searched for among the close fur, and the same applies to the ears which have no external shell. Shakespeare, who thought the Mole sightless, was aware of his acute sense of hearing--

"Pray you, tread softly, that the blind Mole may not Hear a footfall."

The flexible snout is adapted for turning up the earth after the immense hands with their large, strong nails have loosened it. They are wide-open hands that cannot be closed and the palms always face outwards. The hairs constituting the velvety fur are all set vertically, so that they will lie forwards or backwards or to either side; and the colour appears to change according to our point of view--two persons viewing the same Mole can describe it correctly as black and as grey. It is really a dark grey.

The teeth should be examined. In the upper jaw there are six incisors of equal size--three on each side--two comparatively large canines of triangular shape and flattened from the sides, eight little premolars and six molars. In the lower jaw the dentition is somewhat puzzling, as the canines are similar to the incisors and the first premolar is developed into a suitable mate for the upper canine. These are not teeth designed for gnawing like those of the Rat and Rabbit; they are for biting insects and other small creatures, and agree in general with those of the Shrews. The formula stands thus:

i 3/3, c 1/1, p 4/4, m 3/3 = 44.

The adult Mole is a slave to his appetite, and if kept without food for only a few hours he dies of starvation. Knowing this, the old writers averred that he kept a store of bitten worms so that he might draw upon it on emergency; but this statement has never been substantiated by careful observers.

Every one is familiar with the diagrams of what was styled fancifully the Mole's Fortress, as though it were a stronghold held by force against an enemy. There is really no more reason for calling it a fortress than for applying the same term to a Rabbit's burrow or a bird's nest. The idea upon which the originators of the fortress story worked was that the molehill was a place of intricate passages where the invader could be given the slip: Le Court, the French inventor of the term, whose account was published by Antoine Cadet de Vaux in 1803, described its interior as having a central chamber surrounded by two galleries, one above, the other below, connected by five nearly equidistant passages. From the upper and smaller gallery three similar passages gave access to the central hall, at the bottom of which was a bolt-hole communicating with the main run. Plans and elevations, as an architect would describe them, were made of these details, and for a hundred years every writer on the Mole reproduced these illustrations without doubting their absolute accuracy. It was so much more easy to accept them than to patiently explore and accurately draw the actual structure. Of course, what these writers described as a fortress must not be confused with the "mole-heaves" or "tumps" thrown up at frequent intervals to get rid of the earth from a newly excavated run. These are only a few inches in height. The home of the Mole--the molehill proper--is about a foot high and about three feet broad in any direction. This, as a rule, will be found partly sheltered by a bush, sometimes well out in a pasture, and always on the line of the Mole's high-road, which lies deeper than the newer side runs he is always excavating for hunting purposes. These are but little below the surface, in the richer soil where there are more worms and grubs and where the dug-out earth is easily pushed up to the surface by the pressure of his head.

Moral writers used to commiserate the poor blind Mole for having to expend its energies in ceaseless toil in the dark underground, and then rhapsodise on its marvellous adaptation to its rôle in nature, getting lost in admiration of the mathematical skill displayed in the construction of the "fortress" they had never seen and which was largely an imaginative piece of engineering. It is true that its body may be said to fit the tunnels it has excavated, though it might be more accurate to say that the tunnels are modelled upon and by the Mole's form, for it is the constant passage of the animal backwards and forwards that smooths and consolidates their walls. The sense of sight is of less importance to it than that of smell, which is apparently its most highly-developed sense, though that of hearing is very acute.

Although the eyes are complete in the sense that eyeballs and lenses are present, they are so small and so completely surrounded by fur that it does not appear that the Mole can get any great advantage from their possession, even when he is above ground. The diameter of the eyeball is one millimetre--that is, considerably less than the head of a "short white" pin!

At the end of the last century, my friend Mr. Lionel E. Adams set himself the task of providing some more reliable information as to the life-story and habits of the Mole, and in four years of research did not hesitate in the interests of science to break in upon the digger's privacy in order to explore his so-called "fortress," and the nursery of Mrs. Mole. He was not content with cutting sections of two or three of these erections; he examined three hundred of them, finding a considerable variation in their arrangements, but not one of them was like the familiar drawings in the books of Thomas Bell and J. G. Wood, copied from French authors.

Mr. Adams experienced great difficulty in making these observations owing to the nature of the subject, but he persevered and made plans of sections from a hundred of the three hundred hills he explored, and found that no two plans were alike. Some were very simple, others exceedingly complicated, "but," he says, "in no case have I found one to tally exactly with the time-honoured figure originating from Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, elaborated by Blasius, and copied from him by every succeeding writer, apparently without the slightest attempt at verification."

But even in those cases where there is some approach to the plan of the old diagram, Mr. Adams found that it was clearly not due to any scheme for constructing a baffling system of bolt-runs for defensive purposes, but purely incidental to the work of excavating the nest cavity and getting rid of the material dug out. The easiest way to dispose of this redundant earth is to push it to the surface, and to do this a tunnel has to be made above the nest cavity. This, as a rule, is originally only from two to six inches below the surface, but the hoisting out of the surplus earth causes the formation of a solid dome of considerable thickness above it. The tunnels thus made to get rid of earth usually end in blind terminals, and would not be available for escape in the case, say, of the "fortress" being entered by a Weasel. It is notable that in the only one of Mr. Adams' plans that approaches nearly to the old figure there is no connection between the "galleries" and the nest cavity.

In some soils (like the Bunter Sandstone) Adams found that stones of four ounces are turned out--that is, equal to the average weight of an adult Mole. He also found that "the softer the soil, as a rule, the nearer are the runs to the surface."

In his work "De la Taupe," de Vaux says: "The Mole places his habitation in the most favourable spot in his cantonment; he studies everything, and never does he make a mistake except under circumstances which he has been unable to foresee, such as continuance of rains, a flood; then he makes up his mind promptly, and establishes himself elsewhere. It is by preference that he places his fortress in the foundation of a wall, under a hedge, at the foot of a tree."