Natural History Wanderings

The Guardian reports that the U.K.’s hedgehog population has been in serious decline.

The People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), a charity which has been running counts of hedgehogs for over a decade and compiled the figures, believes there are now fewer than a million hedgehogs left in the UK, down from estimates of around 2 million in the mid-1990s and 36 million in the 1950s. David Wembridge, PTES’s surveys officer, said the fall should “ring alarm bells”.

Possible reasons for the decline include habitat loss, poor management of hedgerows, climate change, fragmentation of habitat from roads and other development. Habitat fragmentation is a major contributing factor to tens of thousands of hedgehogs killed in traffic annually. Read more at: Hedgehog population in dramatic decline | Environment | guardian.co.uk.