As we sat enjoying a dinner of curried lentils the other night, I noticed something dark walking past the kitchen window. Thinking it was the neighbor's cat, I glanced up to see a very self-possessed hedgehog picking his way across our garden path. As I stepped outside with my camera, he stopped and regarded me with an expression of something between surprise and pity, before getting on with his business of inspecting our yard for snacks.
Henry begins his evening forage
Henry shakes his head at me and moves on
As we learned in a previous blog post, hedgehogs are not native to New Zealand, but there is more to the story. Russell, our next-door neighbor, tells us that when people first tried to introduce hedgehogs here, the animals just didn't take, so they stepped up their implementation plan. In Noah's ark fashion, they packed a bunch of hedgehogs on a train and dropped them off in pairs around the country. Apparently this method was a real success! I had trouble confirming this tale on the internet, but I did run across a story about a New Zealand man who attacked a teenage boy by throwing a hedgehog at him. I'm not sure who suffered more from this incident--the boy, the hedgehog, or the policeman who had to write the report--but either way, it was really uncool. The man was fined 500NZ$ for his poor judgement.
