The Curious Incident of the Ouriço in the Daytime

Living so close to the sea and the Ria Formosa it has come as no surprise to have a constantly changing selection of birds to view and enjoy – recently enhanced through the gift of binoculars. There’s been everything from robins to spoonbills and flamingos to hiboobies (the Portuguese mistakenly spell this hoopoe) but we’ve also had a fair selection of flightless animals to pique our interest.

The little fellow below is an example and very nearly got a bit of misplaced revenge for something far less cute that had caused us problems earlier in our adventures. Stood at the front door surveying my manor (aka front yard) I spied four spindly legs and a pointed snout under the gate sniffing and scurrying along the street. I advised the boss to look away as I thought it was a brazen ratanza on our patch and I was going to open a can of whup-ass. Okay I was probably going to open the gate and hope it shot off before I had to actually decide to do anything but that’s not the image I’m trying to sell here…..

And to everyone’s relief there it was, a little, spiky, confused ouriço (for those that know her that is not another nickname for The Boss but a wee hedgehog.) Now, being the fans of the Discovery Channel that we are / people that have Google, we were fully aware it is unusual for one of these creatures to be wandering the streets during the day so we had to assume that the gardening work going on a few doors down had woken the most famous member of the erinaceous family from his slumber.

After a bit of staring and more internet searching we found that most people passing were talking the proverbial when they said give it some milk as this causes the poor creatures to get the proverbials. So a bit of water and zookeeper like care found him deposited in a big comfy cardboard box (later to be recycled as I know Greta Thunderberg is still a keen follower of me) and released back into a safe spot in a more natural habitat than the mean streets of Cabanas de Tavira.

There have been plenty of other unexpected creatures we’ve encountered so far but they aren’t quite as cute as the hedgehog so he gets his own post – this is not a reflection on the Egyptian Mongoose we saw as it may well have been a lovely thing in it’s prime before what looked like an articulated lorry and flock of vultures got to it first. Pictures to be posted on my dark web version……