Prickly research subjects in the pale moonlight...

A night out with tag team hedgehog
BBC News

If you met Anouschka Hof by chance one moon-bright summer night, you might assume she was a TV licence detector gone feral, as she strides around the villages of north Norfolk brandishing a two-metre-long metal antenna.



But the prey for this particular hunt are much more homely; Anouschka is looking for hedgehogs.

"I work during the night, I sleep during the day - I become a hedgehog," she tells me.

The ambition is to find out where they go and how they live, trying to comprehend the factors that may lie behind their recent decline, and whether the modifications we are making to the landscape could stimulate a recovery.

The antenna is listening for signals sent out by tiny transmitters which the researchers have stuck on the animals' backs.

As we arrive, so does research assistant Reda Garmute, carrying an untagged hedgehog she has found along the edge of a neighbouring field.

Here, the full glamour of cutting-edge science reveals itself as Anouschka prepares to fit it with a fresh transmitter, using scissors and a tube of high-strength glue.

As the animal nestles quietly in her lap, she trims the spines on a patch of its back, leaving stumps on which the glue will find some purchase.

Fifteen minutes later, the tag is fixed, and we return her - by now we know it is a female - back to the same place in the same field.

One more hedgehog is now added to the group that Reda and Anouschka will follow through the length of the Norfolk summer.

What would motivate someone to spend the best three months of the British year leading this unusual existence, secluded and nocturnal?

For Dr Hof, it is a combination of the research itself, and the need for it.

"I think it's important, because hedgehogs are in decline at the moment and it's nice to do something to find out what the reason is behind this decline.

"We still don't really know what's good for them," says Anouschka.

"We think a lot, but we don't really know."

The fieldwork has now finished. When the data is analysed, we should know a little bit more about the prospects for this most fascinating of mammals.

It would be a terrible shame if these cute little guys disappeared forever, wouldn't it? And they do so much good, eatin' slugs and bugs that attack gardens and roses. I guess the slugs don't like them much, but slugs aren't endangered, by a long shot.

I'm glad these hoomans are givin' up their sleep in order to look out for these prickly characters. If somebody doesn't care enough to do something, it'll be too late...