Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell

Author:Katherine Rundell [Rundell, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

The

Hedgehog

Pliny the Elder was not an easy man. He reprimanded his nephew, Pliny the Younger, for walking the streets instead of being carried, thereby wasting hours in which he could have been reading. But in 77 CE Pliny turned the focus of his attention to the hedgehog in his Historia Naturalis, and gave birth to one of the loveliest myths in natural history. “Hedgehogs,” he wrote, “prepare food for the winter. They fix fallen apples on their spines by rolling on them and, with an extra one in their mouth, carry them to hollow trees.” St. Isidore of Seville picked up on the idea, insisting that hedgehogs collected grapes on their spines in order to carry them to their young. Charles Darwin wrote in 1867 that he had it on good authority that the hedgehog could be seen in the Spanish mountains “trotting along with at least a dozen of these strawberries sticking on its spines…carrying the fruit to their holes to eat in quiet and security.”

Of all the wild untruths in the world that we might wish were fact, this is high on this list. In fact, hedgehogs do not eat fruit, preferring beetles, worms, eggs, and small carrion, nor do they hoard food for the winter, nor have there been any recorded instances of their using their spines as cocktail sticks. But they are nonetheless remarkable, for their place in history, for their survival skills, and for their delicate, erudite-looking beauty. Each hedgehog has around six thousand hollow spines, nut-brown at the base, rising to a strip of black and changing at the very tip to the purest white. When threatened, they roll into an impenetrable ball, which deters almost all animals except badgers, and us: Pliny wrote that you could unroll them by sprinkling boiling water on them, which does, unlike his dietary notes, seem to be true.

Aristotle suggested that hedgehogs mate upright on their hind legs, belly to belly, to avoid each other’s spines. In fact, they mate like other four-legged mammals, although the process is more stressful than for most: it’s not unusual for the female to move off, mid-mate, leaving the male struggling to keep up on two hind legs, slipping slowly down the rake of the female’s back. Hence the old joke: How do hedgehogs mate? With great and scrupulous care. When the hoglets come, after thirty-two days’ gestation, they are born utterly soft and reddish-pink, with a thin layer of skin over their spines; the spikes start to break through it immediately after birth. Within ten days they have learned how to roll into a ball; within fourteen, their eyes open, and they take on that distinctive look of polite, gracious inquisitiveness.

Although hedgehogs are ancient—they existed almost unchanged fifteen million years ago, back when we were still great apes—the name hedgehog is a recent invention. In Middle English they were irchouns—from the Latin ericius, a spiky military rod used for defense—or urchins. In one medieval recipe book, the “hirchone” is a kind

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