What Do Hedgehogs Eat in the Wild? Beetles, Worms and More

What wild hedgehogs eat most

The European hedgehog is a generalist that eats almost any small animal it can catch on the ground. Scientists know what it eats from two main sources: analyses of droppings, and the stomach contents of hedgehogs killed on roads. Both point to the same core menu.

A hedgehog’s teeth are small, sharp and spaced for gripping and crunching hard-bodied insects, which suits a diet of beetles and other prey with tough outer skeletons.

How hedgehogs find food at night

Hedgehogs are nocturnal and rely far more on smell and hearing than on eyesight. A foraging hedgehog moves in a slow, wandering line with its nose close to the ground, stopping often to sniff the air. It pushes its snout into leaf litter, moss and loose soil and digs out prey with its claws.

Feeding is noisy: hedgehogs snuffle, grunt and crunch as they eat, which is often the first sign that one is nearby. On a typical night a hedgehog covers about 1–2 km (0.6–1.2 miles) while foraging, and breeding males can travel up to 3 km (1.9 miles). Lawns, pasture, hedgerows and woodland edges are favorite feeding grounds because they hold plenty of worms, beetles and caterpillars.

How scientists study hedgehog diet

Most diet studies sort through hedgehog droppings, which are dark, about 1.5–5 cm (0.6–2 in) long and often glitter with fragments of beetle wing cases. Hard parts such as beetle shells, caterpillar jaws and millipede segments survive digestion and can be identified under a microscope.

This method has a known bias. Soft-bodied prey such as earthworms and slugs leave few remains, so they can be under-counted unless researchers look for tiny traces such as the bristles of earthworms. Stomach contents of road-killed hedgehogs help fill the gap and confirm that worms and slugs are eaten regularly, even if beetles and caterpillars appear most often.

Does the hedgehog diet change through the year?

Yes. Hedgehogs eat whatever invertebrates are most plentiful at the time, so their diet shifts with the seasons and the weather.

• Spring: after hibernation, hedgehogs need to regain weight quickly and feed on earthworms, beetles and early caterpillars.
• Summer: caterpillars, beetles and other insects are abundant, and this is when most young hedgehogs learn to forage.
• Autumn: hedgehogs eat as much as they can to build up fat for hibernation. Young animals born late in the year struggle if insects run out before they are heavy enough.
• Dry spells: in hot, dry weather earthworms and slugs go deeper underground, and hedgehogs rely more on beetles and other surface insects.

The amount of food available before winter matters a great deal, because a hedgehog survives hibernation on the fat it has stored.

Do hedgehogs eat larger animals?

Occasionally. Hedgehogs will eat the eggs and chicks of birds that nest on the ground, frogs, lizards, young mice and voles, and dead animals they come across. They have also been recorded killing small snakes, including young adders. Hedgehogs have some natural resistance to snake venom, but it is partial, and a bite can still kill one.

These larger meals are opportunistic rather than typical. However, they can matter where hedgehogs have been introduced. In the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, hedgehogs released in the 1970s ate the eggs of wading birds such as dunlin, redshank and lapwing. In New Zealand, introduced hedgehogs eat native insects, snails, lizards and the eggs of ground-nesting birds.

Do hedgehogs compete with other animals for food?

Yes. The hedgehog’s main competitor in much of western Europe is the badger, which also eats large numbers of earthworms and beetles and can kill hedgehogs. Where badgers are common, hedgehogs tend to be scarce, partly because of predation and partly because the two compete for the same prey. You can compare their menus in what do badgers eat?

Birds such as thrushes and blackbirds also eat earthworms and beetles, but they forage by day, so they overlap less directly with the nocturnal hedgehog.

Myths about what hedgehogs eat

• Hedgehogs carry apples on their spines. This image dates back to ancient and medieval writers, but there is no good evidence for it, and fruit is only a minor food.
• Hedgehogs live on slugs. Slugs are eaten, but beetles, caterpillars and earthworms usually matter more. Hedgehogs are all-round invertebrate hunters.
• Hedgehogs are vegetarians. They are not: almost all of their natural diet is animal food.

Because their prey depends on healthy soils, hedgerows and insect life, the decline of farmland invertebrates is one of the reasons hedgehog numbers have fallen in parts of Europe.