Albino Hog

A new hedgehog is coming! I'm ready for a new one, and she is as different from Sally Snert as it is possible for a hog to be and not start an entirely new coloration. New hedgie-pog is an albino! I will be getting her after the 17th. Hopefully she & Miss Felicity will hit it off. If you click on the title "Albino Hog," you'll go to my excellent breeder's site!

Mums for Sally

Here's a photo of the reason for this burial site. Beautiful, bright mums to honor Sally Snert's bright spirit. They have lasted & lasted.

Sally's Second Grave

Here is Sally Snert's final resting place. The lighter brown flecks are lemon verbena, scattered on her grave mound to repel cats & dogs. They are averse to citrus, from what I hear. And she has stayed safely buried so far. This site is much closer to my building, so I can check often.

The Burial Saga

And then, there are the perils of urban pet burial. Initially, I planned to bury Sally at my boyfriend's house, underneath a beautiful little old Japanese maple. However, he is trying to sell & he has raccoons around. How would it look to potential buyers if the coons were digging up the yard? Much less snacking on my little animal? So I picked a little hillock in the midst of my development of condos & townhomes. I never saw anyone walking dogs there, or really frequenting it at all, although it is close to a row of townhomes. So I buried Sally underneath a pretty bush & left a piece of statuary, (hedgehog fairies...they were tacky as all get out, but a gift) to mark the grave.

Then I checked on her every so often. The first thing that happened was that the hedgehog fairy statue disappeared. Ok, no biggie, Sally was still in the ground. I checked on her two days later, and she had been dug up! Sally was there, still wrapped in the pretty green fern patterned cloth I buried her in. But she was a good 3 feet from her grave. Something or someone had disturbed her. This was just getting worse. I felt like the broken marigold.

The Death of Sally Snert

Hello, Abandoned Blog. My little dainty hedgehog, Sally Snert, passed on in August. I noticed that she was shaking, just a little tiny bit, before I went away overnight. When I returned she was dead in the corner of the cage, prickled up & stiff. Poor, sweet little Snert.

Then, unfortunately, I FROZE her. Thinking that, ok, this will preserve her so that I can take her to the vet & the vet can discover what happened. Wrong. To have viable tissue to study, you must REFRIGERATE, not freeze.

So I will never really know what happened. It did seem to me that Sally Snert hadn't grown much, and she was nowhere near as large as Felicity. She was incredibly easy-going, but I wonder if that was because she felt sick? Snert also never, never made any noise. Perhaps something was wrong with her internally? Perhaps a kitty scared her to death? I will never know.

Tuesday Bluesday

Time to whine. I have a broken ankle that is now held together by a stainless steel clamp apparatus. My apartment is an incredible mess. My plants are dying. I am not eating properly. I am teaching two classes. I can't carry a cup of coffee for myself. My sweet little hedgehogs are not getting out of their cage much. I am so incredibly sick of seeing the above view! It's blue for a reason.

Something to look forward to: the cast comes off on July 16th.

Ouch!

A picture book featuring hedgehogs that is lower on my list of favorites is Ouch! by Ragnhild Scammell, illustrated by Michael Terry. It has cutesy cartoonish illustrations. The main character, Hedgehog, and the goat who solves the problem in the end are pretty charming, but their faces don't convey much expression. Also, the landscape is rather green & fruitful for a time when a hedgehog is going to sleep for the winter. The text and the illustrations match, but the pics don't add any depth or nuance to what's going on in the plainly told story.

The plot is based on the old folk idea that European hedgehogs are able to collect fruit and carry it away impaled on their quills. In Ouch!, an apple falls onto & sticks to little Hedgehog. She wishes to get into her nest to hibernate, but now she can't because she won't fit. Other animals offer advice, but when she tries to scrape the apple off, she always ends up with something more stuck in her quills. It's not particularly believeable, even for a fanciful picture book. The best part is when Hedgehog already has stuff all over her quills (Nuts? Really, you think nuts would stick?) and a small piece of blue paper flies through the air. Little Hedgie runs around to avoid it, but it floats right onto her back & sticks! Some days everything just gets all up in your quills...

An interesting facet of this text is the 26 page length. Most picture books are standard at 32 pages. The original UK publisher, Little Tiger Press, added in black & white activity pages in between the full color spreads. Good Books, the US publisher, has left these out.

An Amazon search shows that Scholastic has picked this text up & published an audiotape along with it, changing the title to Apple Trouble. I wonder why the title change?

Why Sally Snert?

The origin of Snert. When my boyfriend and I were brainstorming names for the new hedgie, we got onto to snout, and sniffling, and piggy type names. After this little burst of naming, I came out with Snert, as a name for a male hedgie. They are constantly sniffing and burrowing their little cold cute nosies into you. Well, mine both do! Snert sounds snoutish, and very like what hedgehogs do, just snerting around. However, it didn't fit newbie exactly. She's tiny & thin, and of course, female, so adding Sally, an old-fashioned name that goes nicely with Felicity, seemed to be the answer.

Initially I thought I created Snert, but Google & Wikipedia say no. Remember the Hagar the Horrible comic strip? Yes, truly horrible, but Hagar's dog was named Snert. What's more, the short name for Dutch pea soup is snert! How wonderful! Can't say that I wish to eat pea soup in June, but come Fall, I will make some snert for myself, and leave a bit unseasoned to serve the hedgies. So Sally Snert may enjoy her very own snert in the future. :)

The Happy Hedgehog Band

Right, let's combine hogs and children's literature. A sweet, sweet picture book entitled The Happy Hedgehog Band (1991 in UK; 1992 in US) is one of my favorite pic books featuring hedgies as main characters. By Martin Waddell of Little Bear & Farmer Duck fame, and illustrated by Jill Barton. Harry the hedgehog makes himself a drum, tum-tum-te-tum. When he plays, deep in the heart of Dickon Wood, Helen the hedgehog hears him, wants to join, and so makes a drum and diddle-diddle-dum. Helen wears cherries in her quills, and a few hang down like earrings to really bring the cute. Two other hedgies join, and their names do not begin with H, thank God. So, the happy hedgehog band plays on, Tum-tum-te-tum, diddle-diddle-dum, ratta-tat-tat, BOOM!

Other animals arrive: a variety of them, some quite large, with surprised looks on their faces, and yell, "STOP!" Here is also the perfect place to stop a read aloud, or a child or group of children reading on her/his/their own, to predict what will happen next. Were these human characters, the hogs would surely be too loud, and that's a possibility. It's definitely worth some while to discuss what could happen at this turning point.

Oh, ok, I'll spill. The other animals want to drum too! But, apparently, hedgehogs are the only animals who know how to make drums. Enterprising Harry suggests sounds each animal can contribute: the pheasant can hum, the owl hoot, the mole clap, the bee buzz, and on & on. Then everyone plays together, and "the dog who was lost in the woods just danced." On the last two double page spreads, the sound effect for each animal is incorporated into the illustrations for some terrific phonological awareness fun! I especially like the spider saying a quiet weee as she swings on her web.

Unfortunately, this text is out of print. But it is just another example of the excellent children's literature that Candlewick Press continues to offer us.

The naming of hogs is a serious business

Newbie now has a name! It will be revealed at the end of this post. I started with this list, in no particular order:

• Truffle
• Mocha
• Fern
• Flower
• Sally Snert
• Heidi Hog
• Lucy
• Millicent
• Piglet

I liked all of them and all went well with Felicity. Some just didn't fit Newbie's personality, though. I threw out Millicent & Lucy. Millicent is too cold & formal for her, and Lucy too boring. Mocha, while fitting nicely with her looks, made her sound too edible. Then Heidi Hog went because I just didn't like it enough.

So now I had the short list:

• Fern
  
• Flower
  
• Sally Snert
• Piglet
• Truffle

Then, I passed the short list to The Boy, my son, to select the final name. It didn't take him long before he decided on......

SALLY SNERT!

So, how do the hedgies get along?

Felicity HufflePuff Hedgehog, the original hog, is a snuggler and a sweetie. She has been to visit a classroom of Baltimore City first graders, where she allowed everyone to handle her at least a bit! By the end, she had had enough, and turned into a little ball of prickles and a nose. Nonetheless, I was a little anxious about how she would react to Newbie, the latest acquisition to the household.

I put Newbie into the bathtub for a temporary home. Safe from escape, as she can't get up the sides, easy to clean up her little poops, safe from kitty-cats who might think she's a snack. (I'm looking at you, Annabelle.) Then, I brought Felicity to the bathtub, as neutral territory. Felicity has been in the bathtub twice in her life, as we do baths in the sink. How did it go? Lots of sniffling, and a bit of huffing and puffing and spiking up, but overall wonderfully well!
What was I worried about?

Tubing, the sport of hedgehogs

She is tubular! African hedgehogs enjoy sticking their little heads into empty toilet paper tubes, or specially made tubes of craft foam that are the same size. They shake their heads about, flip over, roll around, walk around, trot around, all while wearing the tube. It is ridiculously cute. Some hogs will tube, then scoop up a bit of handy small stuff, like cat food or pelleted bedding, and then sling the bits around. Newbie is a confirmed tuber at 2 months old.

New baby hedgehog!

There is a new addition to the household! A tiny baby African hedgie, chocolate pinto female, currently installed in the bathtub for safety. Felicity, the original hog, is getting along with her just fine, as most female hedgehogs do. However, I am cautious about putting Newbie (that's a placeholder name; she'll get her real name soon) into Felicity's cage, because that has been strictly Felicity territory. There can be fights and biting. Newbie is vastly different in size from Felicity, so I am definitely feeling protective.

Newbie is an explorer. A tuber extraordinaire! As you can see from the pictures. She is amazingly social for a tiny thing. The breeder says that her litter seemed to have exceptional eyesight, and she does seem to see better than Felicity does.

Needless to say, I LOVE her. She and Felicity have been tubing in the tub together! See next posts.

The Little White Horse

"Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people -- those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food; and Miss Heliotrope, Maria, and Wiggins were typical representatives of their own sort of people."

This quote from Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse (1946) will serve me for blogging categories. I, like J.K. Rowling, absolutely adored The Little White Horse, and picked it up and bought it due to her statement on the paperback cover...so good job there Penguin Putnam marketing people.

I am Miss Heliotrope, Maria, and Wiggins rolled into one, since I take comfort in all three: literature, personal adornment and food. Pretty often food & literature at the same time. :) Wiggins is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, so that gets me a cross-category that I'll write about all the time, Animals.