Northern white-breasted hedgehog

Description

The northern white-breasted hedgehog (Erinaceus roumanicus) is a species of hedgehog. The range of the species extends in the west as far as Poland, Austria and the former Yugoslavia, and south to Greece and the Adriatic Islands, including populations on Crete, Corfu and Rhodes. It is found eastwards through Russia and Ukraine, as far east as the Ob River in Siberia. It is widespread throughout this range, and there are no signs of a significant population decline. Taxonomically, it was for a time considered to be a subspecies of E. europaeus, and later a subspecies of E. concolor. Since the 1990s, it has been considered a separate species in its own right, following new genetic and morphological studies, with five subspecies E. roumanicus roumanicus, E. roumanicus bolkayi, E. roumanicus drozdovskii, E. roumanicus nesiotes, and E. roumanicus pallidus. The species is a common synanthrope and is known to carry not only the hedgehog tick, Ixodes hexagonus, but also Ixodes ricinus, the most common European tick species.