The Fun Zone
Colouring pages to print out, a game where you're in charge of the hedgehog hospital, and ten facts to amaze a grown-up with.
🖍️ Colouring pages
Ten free pictures to print out and colour in — hoglets, hedgehog highways, and a really tricky patterned one for older kids. Download the whole lot as one PDF.
🎮 Hogspital Ward
Poorly hedgehogs are arriving. Weigh them, warm them up, feed them the right food and treat what's wrong — then set them free. How many can you get home?
Ten brilliant hedgehog facts
5,000 spines
A grown-up hedgehog has around five to seven thousand spines. They're not thorns — they're hairs, made stiff with the same stuff as your fingernails.
An array
A group of hedgehogs is called an array. You'll almost never see one though — hedgehogs are loners and only really meet up to mate.
Soft at birth
Hoglets are born with their spines hidden under the skin, so they don't hurt their mum. The first white spines push through within hours.
They lick strange things
Smell something new and a hedgehog will chew it, make a frothy spit, and flick it all over its own spines. It's called self-anointing and nobody is entirely sure why they do it.
Faster than they look
A hedgehog can trot along at about 4mph — a decent jog for you — and covers one to two miles in a single night.
Rubbish eyes, brilliant nose
Hedgehogs can barely see. They find beetles, worms and each other almost entirely by smell and by sound.
They're called urchins
The old English word for a hedgehog is urchin. That's exactly why the spiky thing on the seabed is called a sea urchin.
Not a porcupine
They look similar but they're not related at all. A porcupine's quills detach and stick in you. A hedgehog's spines stay firmly attached.
They sleep all winter
Hedgehogs hibernate from around November to March — but they wake up now and then and sometimes move to a whole new nest mid-winter.
Milk makes them ill
Every storybook gets this wrong. Hedgehogs can't digest milk and it gives them diarrhoea that can kill them. Water, always.
Made something brilliant?
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