Prickly

Guess what? No flowers today! Not yellow ones or any other colour either! Today I’m giving you something sharp but still so cuddly looking: A hedgehog!

This fellow lives in our garden. Hedgehogs move in the night, during the day they sleep. For some reason this one was on the move in the afternoon today – and my pooches went just crazy seeing him behind the garden swing! Of course the hedgehog huddled up and the pooches were powerless against its sharp spikes. I took the boys inside and came back with my camera – and some doggy treats. First Spikey remained an angry ball. I carefully tried to get some disturbing grasses away and he’d angrily hiss and growl – and jump! Have you seen a curled up hedgehog jump? It looks really funny! However, he smelled the doggy treats (yeah, hedgehogs love dog food) and cautiously started looking for them. I tried to catch his eyes and nose with my camera – but as soon as he heard the shutter click he’d huddle up again! And since it was overcast and low on light, this was the result with 1/40 seconds exposure:

Slowly he got used to the shutter sound and just munched away the treats from the grass, without minding my camera. I was using my 70-200 mm lens – its shortest focusing distance is 1,2 meters and at times Spikey came so close to me I couldn’t make the lens focus anymore!

When all the treats were gone he didn’t care sticking around anymore. And he still was convinced that I was to be totally ignored. So off he went and disappeared under a huge spruce. But I finally caught both his nose and eye in the same picture!