Open 24 hours a day, Folly was first set up by husband-and-wife team Dave and Annette Risley. It started in their back garden, with sheds, aviaries and hutches, and bit by bit they raised the funds to build the fantastic well-equipped centre they have now.
When you arrive at Folly, in Broadwater Forest, not far from where I live in Tunbridge Wells, you’re greeted with a cacophony of cooing and chirping, because the wall beside the reception desk is stacked with birdcages three or four tiers high.
Go past reception and you find yourself in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Here you will be greeted by two tiers of incubators for younger birds or small mammals or for the older ones that need intensive care, alongside a whole wall of bigger cages for recovering birds and small furries, plus a large examination table in the middle for checking over all the newly admitted animals. Beyond the ICU is the hedgehog ward: dozens of white, glass-fronted, ventilated cages – all of them full – alongside work surfaces for feeding, weighing and examining the animals daily.
Finally there is the ‘other animals’ ward, where badgers, rabbits, pheasants and the odd stoat, owl or duck reside. This ward has bigger cages and two small rooms attached to it where the larger animals can move around a bit better. The charity has a second site for rescued deer and there is another local charity that deals with foxes, so these animals are rarely seen in this hospital.
In all the wards every cage door has a chart attached to it, with details of when the animal arrived, its weight, diagnosis and the treatment and food it’s being given.
I first worked at Folly when I started my vet training, when I did a week’s work experience. Back then I helped to clean cages and feed the animals, but now that I was a qualified vet I was put to work examining and diagnosing the new arrivals and helping to decide on and administer treatment.
The centre is staffed by three well-trained, resourceful animal care assistants, alongside Annette and Dave and several willing volunteers, but there was no vet. They were trying to raise funds at the time to build a fully equipped vet suite, which I was only too happy to advise Dave on, with the intention of eventually employing a full-time vet. In the meantime, though, they were glad of any passing vet who was happy to come in and help out.
The little hedgehog caught in the bonfire is typical of the patients that people bring in to centres like Folly. It is sadly all too common for hedgehogs, which live in close proximity to humans, to be caught in bonfires, attacked by dogs, run over by lawnmowers (or cars), or to slip into garden ponds or be trapped in fencing. Sometimes they’re found wandering about during the day when they should be sleeping. That usually means they’re short of food. Sometimes they are found sick – with mange, lungworm or mites – or simply struggling to survive because they’ve been born too late in the year and haven’t put on enough weight to be able to hibernate and survive their first winter.
Hedgehogs are Britain’s favourite wild creature. Immortalised in Beatrix Potter’s much-loved story of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, as well as in numerous books and poems by literary giants such as the poet Philip Larkin, everyone loves them. Yet sadly they’re becoming a rare sight and are even at risk of becoming endangered. Over the past 50 years it is estimated that hedgehog numbers have fallen from around 36 million in the UK to fewer than a million, largely due to loss of their natural habitat. With fewer wilderness areas, hedgehogs are short of both food and safe spaces in which to live and nest. Thousands of them die on the roads, and while looking for food they often stray into gardens that can be full of dangers to them.
There are 17 species of hedgehog; little mammals whose spines are made of hollow hairs hardened by keratin, the stuff that human hair and nails are made from. A distant relative of the shrew (but nothing to do with porcupines), hedgehogs are believed to have changed very little in the past 15 million years, so it would be heartbreaking if we lost them now.
Folly is one of the places doing their utmost to save hedgehogs, by nursing back to health those injured animals that are brought in and by raising awareness of these little creatures and their habits and habitats. If everyone kept a little bit of wilderness in the corner of a garden, made sure that the animals could get out of the garden through a hole in the fence, and looked out for hedgehogs when building ponds or fires, it would make a real difference to their survival rate.
My next case there that day was a mother hedgehog and her two tiny babies, all of them riddled with mites. Their skin was raw and itchy and they’d lost quite a few spines. Mite infestation is very common in hedgehogs; the mites are parasites that are usually too small to see, but they’re easy to treat with the same spot treatment you use for dogs.
Before we applied the spot-on treatment (to avoid it getting washed off) we gave them a family bath in a washing-up bowl containing an inch of warm water with baby oil in it, to soothe their skin and keep it nice and soft. They loved it and we soon had them settled comfortably in a cage together, tucking into a bowl of cat food. Hedgehogs love cat or dog food, scrambled eggs and, as a special treat, rusks soaked in goat’s milk, as they are unable to digest cows’ milk properly. All of these treats are prepared in the centre’s kitchen, which is just along from the ‘other animals’ ward. Making up a load of delicious food, all served on plant-pot saucers, was a lot of fun. I enjoyed being chef to 30 little creatures!
The hedgehogs were easy to work with, too, as long as you managed to avoid the spines and didn’t mind the vast amount of faeces that came out of them, no matter how much or how little they ate. The birds, on the other hand, well, they could be a bit of a challenge, especially the collared doves. And there were a lot of collared doves.
Pigeons and doves are very similar; they all belong to the bird family Columbidae, though traditionally the name dove tends to be used for the smaller species and pigeon for the larger ones. I hadn’t had a lot of experience of working with birds before I went to Folly, but during my time there I learned a lot more about them and it really helped my confidence in interacting with them. I hadn’t ever thought much of pigeons, but since being around lots of them I have discovered that they’re friendly, silly birds that you can’t help liking.
Even more surprising is that the different varieties have very different personalities. The collared doves are notoriously naughty and not very bright. They’re like thoroughbred horses: no brains and lots of energy. The second you opened their cages they would shoot out, which made it extremely hard to treat them. Each time one of them escaped the receptionist would yell, ‘Windows!’ and we’d all race to shut every window and door to stop the bird getting out. Then we’d face the tricky job of recapturing it, which usually took at least 10 minutes and often required the use of a net, which stood propped up in the corner ready for this all-too-common scenario.
When they weren’t escaping the collared doves were trying to peck you. I had to handle one with a swollen eye – it had a virus known as pox and it needed eye drops. Many of the other birds needed oral medication and, after a few unsuccessful attempts, thanks to Heather I learned a good way of holding the head so that the bird couldn’t move or peck me. I put two fingers on either side of the beak and two fingers behind the head. Not only did it keep them still, it allowed me to open the beak so that I could pop medicine in for the ones that needed oral medication or to feed those that weren’t eating properly.
The wood pigeons were a whole lot easier. Their main concern was food, so far from trying to escape they would settle in happily for the free feeds. They’d quickly get the idea that we would hand-feed them when they were sick, and started begging like dogs, especially the younger ones, jumping up and down at the front of the cage, making a squawking racket. Then, when you took them out, they would happily open their mouths wide ready for food.
While some breeds of pigeon were common at Folly, a racing pigeon was a rare sight, so when one was brought in one morning we all crowded round to have a look. Larger and far more slender than the other pigeons, this bird looked like pigeon royalty. There was nothing wrong with him, apart from the fact that he had got lost and a member of the public had caught him and brought him in, thinking he must belong to someone since he had a ring on his leg. The ID on the ring was bringing