In Rouen, take part in “La route du hérisson”, a timely operation
Through Joe Hue
Published on
“The hedgehog route” is its name. In Normandy as elsewhere, hedgehog population declines seem. In question, human activity: road collisions, use of pesticides, disappearance of hedges… and partitioning of their habitat. So the city of Rouen and the Normandy Mammalogical Group set up a participatory monitoring and protection programme. The goal is simple: recreate passages between private and public properties to allow hedgehogs to move from garden to garden.
The walls and other fences are indeed so many obstacles that block the path of the small mammal, which needs a home range of several hectares per individual, developing from 1 to 4 km every night to find food and partners… All without being run over on the roads.
The call for applications, at the request of individual residents, duration until next March 1for a meeting with the successful candidates in April and a creation of the passages from April to June 2023. “The passages are 15 centimeters in diameter”, specifies Nicholas Klatkacitizen mobilization officer at Normandy Mammalogical Group (GMN), which monitors of all the mammals of Normandy.
The group has been producing since June 2021 a similar operation in Caen, Piqu’Caen, with already “220 participating gardens and 105 holes made”. This allows “to act at his level” and “it’s not just a passage”: people sign a charter and undertake to preserve urban biodiversity and improve in their labeled garden wildlife in general“by pretending to have a pile of leaves, by mowing less, by arranging suitable shelters, by installing a bramble or a water point”.
“And at the same time we install camera traps. People are content, even moved, to see proof that hedgehogs pass by them. It’s an animal that benefits from a strong sympathy capital.”
The Caen town planning document stipulates that any new construction must include a passage for small terrestrial fauna. This is not (yet?) the case in Rouen, where 7 applications for this “hedgehog route” have already been registered since the beginning of the month. And who says connection of the gardens says locals connection “This project is based on cooperation and local social ties, because any intervention on a wall, adjoining or not, can only be done with the agreement of the two owners”.
“Animal in danger”
Mathilde Billon is the ecologist leading the project at the City of Rouen, which has signed a 3-year agreement with the GMN with funding of 15,000 euros. For her, “in a very anthropized and mineralized urban environment, this device will make it possible to recreate a network of biological corridors and of limiter splitting space to promote the movement of the hedgehog, this endangered animal which risks disappearing in the years to come”.
In Great Britain, 30 % of the hedgehog population would have disappeared in twenty years. In France, if all observers claim to see less and less, scientific studies of population monitoring are lacking. At the national level, France Nature Environnement (FNE) and the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO) have been launched a participatory inventory. In the department, the Oakthe rescue center for wild animals in Allouville-Bellefossehas just completed a study that lasted two years with samples and laboratory analyzes on 200 hedgehogs.
“No epizootic”
To pay Alain Beaufils, the head of the centre, “it appears that there is a problem with the immune defences. There are various and varied pathologies, on different organs: they are often very parasitized, covered inside and out, some are loaded with heavy metals, but we did not find any pesticides. There is no epizootic, a disease that would be found in all hedgehogs… We should continue this study”.
What is certain for him is “that there is a drop in populations” and that the center receives more and more sick hedgehogs: 379 in 2019, 440 in 2020, 691 in 2021. The intimate conviction of the one who has cared for animals there since 1984? “A bad food that annihilates the immune defense”. Le Chêne thus sometimes welcomes hedgehogs fed by the hand of man, “so obese that they cannot no more curling up !
Must therefore follow your diet, made of beetles, caterpillars, earthworms, snails or slugs. So garden beds that attract gastropods, yes. But above all, no kibble for dogs or cats. Alain Beaufils also advisesobstruct the eyes“because they fall into it and cannot come back up”, to be careful when on the brushcutter neck and to stop autonomous mowers “which cause a lot of head play” at least overnight.
Finally, “it is not not a petthe hedgehogs, which are often eaten in the fences, should not be locked up in the garden”… Hence the interest of opening passages there.
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