Earlier this week, David Grant went for a walk with his 1-year-old son and a neighbor through the woods to collect golf balls. Grant’s home is nestled behind the Leigh Golf Club in Culcheth, England, separated only by some wooden posts and barbed wire.
Suddenly, Grant spotted a small puffball on the ground, caught in the treacherous fence. He recognized the quills instantly: a hedgehog.
Lucy Grant
He trekked back home to get his wife for help.
“When I got there, I noticed there was a second hedgehog curled up less than a meter away,” Lucy Grant told The Dodo. “I Googled ‘hedgehog rescues nearby’ whilst my husband went to get the wire cutters to free it.”
Lucy Grant
Irene Thompson at Lowton Hedgehog Rescue advised the Grants to carefully cut the hedgehogs free from the fence, wrap them in towels and drive them the 10 minutes to her rescue.
Seeing hedgehogs during the daytime is rare, according to The British Hedgehog Preservation Society. They’re nocturnal, so Thompson guessed they’d been stuck overnight. Hedgehogs are also crucial parts of the ecosystem and help maintain healthy soil.
Sadly, in the past few years, hedgehog populations have declined in the UK, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources now considers them a near-threatened species.
Lucy Grant
Once in Thompson’s care, she examined each animal closely. The second one, whom Lucy spotted, had a minor wound, which Thompson treated before sending him home to be released that night.
The other was in rough shape.
“He has a puncture to each side of his body,” Thompson told The Dodo, “where the prongs of the barbed wire pierced his flesh. This meant he was unable to move at all.”
Lucy Grant
Luckily, thanks to the Grants’ quick action, the hedgehog landed in the best place for recovery. Thompson removed a piece of barbed wire from the hedgehog’s side, cleaned the injury and gave him medicine.
Lowton Hedgehog Rescue
For the next week or so, he’ll get antibiotics and pain relief in Thompson’s care, followed by any parasite treatment he might need. In an ode to what the little animal survived, Thompson named him Prong.
Lowton Hedgehog Rescue
“Sometimes trauma [or] stress can produce extra internal parasite activity,” Thompson said. She’ll test the hedgehog in the coming days to make sure the prickly animal is in the clear, but his wounds are already healing well.
As for the Culcheth community, locals wrote on Facebook that the golf club’s groundskeeper is looking at the fence to see what can be done so no wildlife gets injured in the future.
