This is a truly wonderful book, erudite and fun. Karen R. Jones, a kind of alternative David Attenborough, explains her purpose: ‘Charismatic and amazing creatures are not only to be found in distant places. They are here. In our everyday spaces.’ Switching effortlessly and with relish between history, science and anecdote, the author selects ten creatures to represent Britain. Hedgehog and fox are polled highest as ‘the nation’s top animal’. Her other choices may surprise: sheep, pigeon, newt, herring, stag beetle, flea, black dog and plesiosaur.
The largest fox ever recorded, reported by the Daily Mail in 2012, was in Moray, Aberdeenshire, weighing 17 kilos. Foxes mate for life. One in seven cubs die in their first month, and their parents bring them playthings. A Bristol study recorded ‘gardening gloves, tennis balls and dog chews’. Excavations at a 16,500-year-old burial site in northern Jordan unearthed the grave of a woman and the bones and skull of ‘what was deemed to be’ her pet fox. The nature writer and farmer John Lewis-Stempel describes the vixen’s call ‘as the eeriest sound of the British night’.
Hedgehogs have been around for the past 15 million years. ‘They witnessed the demise of the woolly mammoths and saw the arrival of humans on these isles.’ They were known as ‘furze-man-pigs’ in Gloucestershire, ‘pochins’ in Somerset, ‘zarts’ in Cornwall and ‘prickleback urchins’ in Sussex. After Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle was published in 1905, according to the ecologist and ‘hedgehog man’ Hugh Warwick, this little mammal, hitherto ‘discarded and dismissed’, became extremely popular. Alas, partly due to corporate farming, there are fewer than one million in Britain today.
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