The Beauty in the Beast by Hugh Warwick, Simon & Schuster £14.99 Reviewed by Alastair Mabbott
Hugh Warwick has got used to being "the hedgehog man".
It was a name that would inevitably stick, after 25 years of studying the creatures, helping to stop the Uist hedgehog cull in early 2007 and writing the book A Prickly Affair about his favourite woodland animals.
In the introduction to this book, he describes how he eventually had a hedgehog tattooed on his ankle as part of a campaign to support British biodiversity.
It was around this point when it dawned on him that, around the country, there would be similarly obsessive individuals. If there was a "hedgehog man", he would be most likely to find an "otter man" or an "owl man" too.
The Beauty In The Beast is about how Warwick reached out to find enthusiasms that matched his own, and to see if they were infectious enough to rub off on him as well. His objective was not just to find a new animal he could love, but one that the public could take to its heart as well. "I needed people to be able to look into its eyes and feel some sort of kinship."
He encounters 15 animal ambassadors in this book, 15 champions of such creatures as bees, adders, otters and robins, trekking out with them in the night to capture glimpses of bats under a bridge, or by day to watch water voles nibble at pieces of apple by a river.
He meets, for instance, Gareth, who has been accepted as a regular human visitor at his local badger sett for many years, and weeps at the memory of old badgers who have passed on. "My badgers and your hedgehogs, they are like gatekeepers to the wider wonder of the natural world," Gareth tells him, which is Warwick's view exactly.
These are his kind of people. "This is what I love about people like Huma, what passes for a normal conversation is actually a gentle lecture," he writes after meeting bat expert Huma Pearce.
There's an overwhelming urgency to Warwick's quest. Over the last 60 years, Britain's hedgehog population has fallen by a staggering 95%. With only one or two exceptions, the same goes for the people he meets here, whose chosen animals are all struggling from the loss of their habitats.
And it's these people, with their obsessive dedication, who Warwick thinks are essential to re-igniting the British public's dwindling love of the natural world. "I'm not suggesting that a dose of David Attenborough is not a good thing," he writes in this warm and captivating book, "but staying glued to the sofa is not enough."
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