Midnight visitor...

In the middle of the night, Yarrow came into our bedroom and, worriedly, said: ´There´s a hedgehog in the house!´ Half asleep, I thought she was having a nightmare and quietly said, ´Just leave it alone, love. It will go away. Go back to sleep. now´ In the morning, when Niki woke up, concerned that the girls may have overslept (like yesterday), I told her, ´My love, stay calm, but you might find a hedgehog in the house somewhere when you go down. They´re harmless.´ Imagine our surprise (and I could have known because I don´t think Australia has hedgehogs), when a rather size-able echidna presented itself - rolled up behind a chair on the upstairs landing ... And imagine the trouble we had moving it. I called the Wildlife Service who advised me to load towels on it and scoop it up, but on doing so Mrs Echidna (or was it Mr? We did find out it is the mating season right now and many Mrs Echidna´s wobble around, snorting, with a puggle) showed a bit of bad temper and snapped at me through the towel. We then tried to shove a flat board underneath it, and a box over it, but it ensconced itself in a corner and wouldn´t budge or be budged. When I put Tess and Yarrow on the school bus I asked Peter, the bus driver, who initially had no idea but then came up with the masterful solution of using a big shovel to scoop it up. Chance (?) had it I had just bought a big shovel yesterday, and indeed - with a bit of wriggling and wrangling, the echindna rolled on its back onto the spade ... looking somewhat blurry and confused (scared probably), as if it was saying ´What the ...?´. We put her out to pasture in one of the gardens where she did not remain for more than a minute before scampering off to safety and shade... What an adventure so early in the day...