Dusk. The commuters are home, the gardens empty, the traffic thinning. Under a hedge, a hedgehog unrolls and begins its evening patrol. Hedgehogs can cover a surprising distance in a single night, trundling from garden to garden in search of beetles, worms and slugs. A solid fence is, to a hedgehog, the end of the world. A small gap at the bottom is a road.
Later, the fox arrives. Urban foxes have made themselves at home in cities across the world, slipping along railway lines and through parks, napping under sheds by day. Their screams on a winter night have alarmed many a half-asleep human. It sounds like trouble. It is usually romance.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the night belongs to the raccoon, whose clever, almost hand-like front paws can open bins, latches and, given enough motivation, the occasional cool box. In Australian suburbs, brushtail possums clatter across tin roofs. In the British countryside, badgers leave the sett along paths their families have used for generations, snuffling through fields with the dedication of a truffle hunter.
These neighbours mostly go unseen, yet the signs are everywhere for anyone who looks. A neat line of prints in fresh snow. A tunnel worn under a hedge. A bin lid nudged aside. A lawn mysteriously dotted with little holes where a badger has been digging for grubs.
Sharing a street with them asks very little. A shallow dish of water on a hot night. A gap at the base of a fence. A quick check of the compost heap or bonfire pile before forking or lighting it, because hedgehogs love to sleep in exactly those places. A lid firmly on the bin. Most of these animals are better left wild, fed by nature rather than by us, and admired from the window rather than the doorstep.
First light. The fox slips back under the shed. The badger returns to its sett. The hedgehog, after a long and productive night, curls up under the hedge where it started, entirely unaware that the people next door spent the evening wondering what on earth dug up the lawn.
Sources: Hedgehog Street, hedgehogs after dark · Lancashire Wildlife Trust, the secret lives of foxes · Raccoon · Common brushtail possum · European badger · Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, protecting hedgehogs at bonfire time