Flustered by the Fauna

On Saturday Laurent and I were enjoying the beautiful summer-like day and the fact that the kids were at their grandparents' for the afternoon by treating ourselves to a bit of good, healthy, backbreaking garden work. (You should see me take the pick-ax to the rocky garden soil...it's worthy of inclusion in the upcoming Friday the 13th remake.)

So I was digging up old potshards and mini-boulders to re-plant a flowering bush, when I heard Ella whining her "I've found something alive, and am too chicken to approach" whine inside the barn. I put down my death-tool and found her in the back of the barn peering into a lowered section of the floor. Two planks were leaning on each other against a sealed-up door, and it looked like something was nesting in between. I pulled the front plank forward and saw this:

At first I thought it was a kitten, and then I got a bit closer and noticed that its fur was kind of spiny-looking.


It had found a sheet of insulation somewhere and shredded it to make a nest. I went to find Laurent, who is usually as clueless as I about Country Things, but he took one look at it and said it was a hérisson. "A baby hérisson?" I asked, thinking he was talking about a porcupine. "Nope, it's full-grown," he replied, and stood there trying to devise a cunning evacuation plan while I went to look up hérisson on the internet.

"Hedgehog", I read, and then went to Wikipedia to see if hedgehogs act like porcupines, shooting barbed spines at people who try to move them out of their barn, and the like.* (They don't.) I went back in the barn to brainstorm with Laurent. My plan was to lure it out with some shepherd's pie leftovers, but Laurent thought it had probably fallen into the pit and couldn't get out on its own.

He remembered trying to get a hedgehog out of his tent once, when he was a teenager, and said it wouldn't budge and tried to bite him. So we went for a self-defense style of approach, picking it and its nest up with a shovel and gently placing it inside a big plastic bin...


then carried it to the back field, and placed the bin on its side so it could get out by itself. I hung around with my camera to see what would happen, and for about ten minutes, nothing did. It unrolled itself, but then kind of just sat around looking disgruntled.


Then, obviously tired of the National Geographic photo shoot I was going overboard with, it crawled out of the bin, took a look around,


and headed straight for the abandoned pig sty, where Laurent and his dad stocked some building stone.


And that was that. If it chose to stay, the hedgehog had a nice new home protected from the elements by a solid roof and from human intruders by the decades-old, but still very strong, pig smell and a row of stinging nettles outside the door.

It would have been the end of the story if I hadn't pulled my camera out that night at Laurent's dad's place to show some REAL countryfolk what we had found in our barn.

In that universal "stay off my land" old farmer way, Alfred, his daughter, and his grandson had spent the sunny afternoon stringing up barbed wire across a beautiful grassy path that people often follow to walk through the woods. "That'll show 'em," Albert grumbled, leaving us to wonder just who he wanted to show and what. They stopped by Jean-Pierre's afterwards for an apéritif, and I showed them this hedgehog photo:


"That's a beau hérisson!" they exclaimed in the way that everyone did when they saw Max as a baby, using beau to mean "fat" rather than "beautiful". "Yep, she looks about ready to pop," one of them said. "Pop?" I repeated, confused. "Well, that's a pregnant hedgehog if I've ever seen one," replied the woman.

And then it all clicked. The hedgehog was using our barn as shelter to give birth to her little hedgehog babies. She COULD get out of the pit, because if not, how did she drag that insulation down there to make a nest? And she probably didn't want to leave the plastic bin because her nice cozy birthing nest was in there, and she'd have to go somewhere else and start all over again before her time came. And what if her time were now? What if the hedgehog babies were cold and uncomfortable and DIDN'T MAKE IT BECAUSE OF ME???

I didn't say anything about it in front of the countryfolk, for fear that they would find my horror so ridiculous that they would force me at pitchfork-point to leave the countryside and move back to the city. But as soon as I got home, I found the remains of the shepherd pie and left it outside the pigsty door.

*Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that porcupines
don't "shoot" their spines, but that's not what
the other kids told me growing up in Alabama!