Les hérissons

Hedgehogs. They are the cutest things, and they're good for the garden because they eat many pests. On Sunday morning I was moving some compost from my compost bins to the garden. There was a good-sized pile of straw in one corner of the compost bin and I thought it was strange. As I started moving the straw I found a big momma hedgehog and five little baby hedgehogs underneath. It was a nest.

They're hard to see, but there is a baby in the lower right corner, and another in the center bottom, just above an ivy leaf. They're rolled up into little spiky balls. The face you can see belongs to the mother hedgehog. There's a third baby just behind her head, and another behind her back end. The fifth is around somewhere.
Click to embiggen.

At first I thought I had stabbed the mother with my pitchfork. But I hadn't. All the 'hogs were rolled up into balls, their defense mechanism had kicked in. I scooped them all up with a shovel and put them under the hedge. Well, that is their name, right?

After a while they unrolled and started moving around. I got the camera and took a few pictures. The light wasn't very good under the hedge so I turned on the flash. I got a lot of blurry photos, but this one turned out ok and was one of the few I got with the mother's face in it.

As I was typing this, Callie started barking, so I went out to see what was up. She found the hedgehogs. They hadn't moved very far from where I put them earlier. I brought Callie into the house and calmed her down. She loves hedgehogs, or at least she loves to bark at them.

I hope they find a new place under the hedge to hang out and grow up. Like I said, we like them, and they're good for the garden.