Talbert Pipes Life in France Adventures Hedgehog Visits The View that we had 90% of the time Hedgehog Visits Anyone who has visited here and seen how our house is situated in the middle of town, with parking lot to one side and road to the other, will understand how odd it was to find this bit of local fauna crawling around the yard recently. During the evenings in the summer, we leave the downstairs door open to let in the cool night air and breeze. We have a homemade screen panel in it to keep out the bugs (this often mystifies French visitors as much as their near-total lack of screen windows mystifies us.. It's really very bizarre to us to visit French homes in the evenings when windows are open and watch everyone totally ignore the inevitable invasion of moths). Our cats love to sit at the screen door and watch the night life in the little enclosed yard outside, though occasionally this pastime is punctuated with hostilities when other cats come to visit. Freya, our black cat, is VERY defensive of our home and tends to go berserk when she spots another cat - climbing on the screen, making a bottle-brush of her tail, and often attacking our other cat in apparent confusion. The other night, however, we got to see an unusual display - lots of tail-fuzzing but no yowling or hissing or antics, just really keen interest from both cats. We went to look and got to see what looked like a big rat crawling across the yard. Almost immediately, a wandering tomcat appeared and attacked the thing. We chased away the cat and found that our visitor was something we didn't have back in North Carolina, a hedgehog. At least, I've gone all my life without ever seeing any in NC, if there are any there. Mostly the NC vermin are beavers, possums, or big rats (I've often wondered how our local friends would react to finding a possum, since these big fat rat-things with little pink human hands are weird even to people who grow up accustomed to them). We weren't sure if the hedgehog was injured or not, or for that matter how it had managed to make it to the middle of town crossing multiple roads without being flattened or attacked, so we decided it would be safer if we brought it inside for the night and took it out to the forest the next day. I looked up hedgehog information on the internet, to see what we should do and/or avoid. As usual, I was stupified to see just how many sites were devoted to such an obscure subject, and I learned that hedgehogs could be fed dry catfood safely, but that the conventional wisdom of putting out a saucer of milk for them was wrong. Apparently, hedgehogs are lactose intolerant! We made up a boxed bed for the beast, filling it with plants and twigs, and set out a dish of water and a dish of catfood. Next morning, the entire box was flattened - all the plants were trampled down and rearranged, and the hedgehog was snoring loudly in his water dish, looking for all the world as though he'd been on a really bad bender. A short drive later, and our visitor (now curled into a defensive ball again) was repatriated to the forests. There are dirt paths and roads crisscrossing the countryside all around here, and it's possible to drive for some time without ever seeing a house or anything but forests and fields, so we went bumping along in the car until we judged ourselves out of roadway range, and turned the critter loose. I realize this is no more exciting to a European than seeing a squirrel in the yard is to us, but it is one of those subtle things that you tend to forget until confronted with it - even the animals are different. Different birds, different rats, etc. Keeps life interesting! For more hedgehog reading, check out this fascinating site: http://hedgehogcentral.com/