28 July 2023
The Internet Knows Too Much About Hedgehog Poo
My wife summoned me to the garden. What followed was an unexpected deep-dive into the surprisingly well-documented world of hedgehog droppings.
It started, as most of life’s great adventures do, with my wife calling my name from the garden in that specific tone. Not the “come look at this nice flower” tone. The other one. The “there is something here and I need a second opinion before I panic” tone.
I went outside.
She pointed at the ground.
There it was.
The Evidence
Small. Dark. Cylindrical. Glistening faintly in the afternoon light like a tiny, sinister sausage that had given up on life. It was, by any reasonable measure, poo. But whose?
This is the sort of question that, twenty years ago, would have gone unanswered. You’d shrug, get a stick, remove it, and carry on with your weekend. The mystery would fade. Life would continue.
We are not living twenty years ago.
We got our phones out.
The Internet, It Turns Out, Has Opinions
I typed “small dark cylindrical droppings garden” into a search engine and what followed can only be described as an education I did not ask for.
The internet, it turns out, knows an extraordinary amount about hedgehog poo.
Not a little bit. Not a helpful paragraph. We’re talking forums. Dedicated threads. Comparison charts. Photographs — many photographs — submitted by enthusiastic citizens who have clearly spent more time crouching in their gardens than I have spent on anything in my entire adult life.
There are people out there who have made it their mission to document, catalogue, and share hedgehog droppings with the world. They have opinions about texture. About colour gradients. About what it means when it’s slightly greenish versus when it’s almost black. One forum post — I am not making this up — referenced seasonal variation.
Seasonal variation.
In hedgehog poo.
The Verdict
Cross-referencing three websites, one Reddit thread, and what appeared to be a wildlife trust PDF that someone had clearly written with great care and absolutely no shame, we reached our conclusion:
Hedgehog.
The signs were all there. The size (roughly 1.5–2cm, since apparently we’re measuring now). The colour (dark, almost black, owing to the hedgehog’s diet of beetles, worms, and whatever else it finds acceptable at 2am). The slightly pointed ends, which are — and I quote — “a key identifying feature.”
My garden has a hedgehog.
In Which I Reflect
Here is what strikes me about this whole episode: somewhere out there, a hedgehog went about its entirely private business in my garden under cover of darkness. It asked for nothing. It wanted no recognition. It was simply passing through, doing what hedgehogs do.
And within four minutes of its visit being discovered, my wife and I had consulted the combined knowledge of the internet, identified the species, understood its diet, and learned more about its digestive process than I know about my own.
The hedgehog has no idea this happened. It is currently sleeping in a hedge somewhere, unbothered and magnificent.
We should all be so lucky.
If you find similar evidence in your garden: congratulations. You have a hedgehog. Leave out some water (not milk — the internet is very firm about this) and consider yourself fortunate.