Searching for Snoozing Dormice Could Save the Species
Wilderness Notes #6 If you can find them, that is
Hi, I’m Sanjida. I’m an award-winning writer and I write about writing, wildlife and wilderness. This post is part of my research for my nature memoir, Wilderness: In Search of Belonging, which I’m serialising on Substack. This post is free, so feel free to share, and do consider subscribing so you can read Wilderness and have access to exclusive resources on how to become a better writer — particularly thrillers and nature writing. I’d love you to meet you…
The frost has already been burnt from the grass and the hazels shimmer with a scintilla of new leaves. On my previous Dormouse Day, mist had hung low over the stream, there’d been ice in the air and the catkins had been flowering. As before, I follow the West Mendip Way from my front door and then clamber up the hill, weaving between old pollarded trees, to emerge at the edge of the wood.
I meet up with a small group of volunteers, led by Katie, from Somerset Wildlife Trust, who is licensed to handle dormice. They legally have to be handled with care because sadly dormice are classed as Vulnerable on the UK’s Red List, although recent studies suggest they should actually be viewed as Endangered. Between 2000 and 2022, the National Dormouse Monitoring Programme showed that the population had fallen by 70 per cent. Hazel dormice have become extinct in 14 English counties and they’re only found in another six because they’ve been reintroduced.
We’re here to survey the numbers in this small area of woodland. The idea is that we will meet every few weeks until the dormice hibernate in October. It’s early on a Sunday morning and any dormice, because they are nocturnal, should be asleep. Katie has a map and a list of all the dormouse boxes, which are numbered. Dormice make their own nests, woven from honeysuckle bark, but when habitat is poor, they’re happy to use wooden nest boxes. So do birds, Katie tells us, so we need to be careful when we look in the boxes in case there are chicks inside.
The wooden boxes have a lid and a hole for the dormice to enter, but unlike a bird box, the hole is turned towards the trunk of the tree. The boxes are quite low down, about a metre from the ground, and attached to the tree with a short bungee cord. Katie explains that we need to put our hand over the hole as we remove the box, just in case any dormice are inside and wake up. Then we carefully lift the lid a fraction, enough to see if the box is empty, or there are birds or a dormouse inside. If we see a dormouse, we need to call her immediately.
We take it in turns to find and look inside the boxes. In one box we find a harvest mouse. In another, a bird’s nest. After an hour, we still haven’t found any dormice. I start to feel despondent. This was part of the wood that we’d walked through with Ian White, the Dormouse Officer for the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, who, since 2006, has been managing their Dormouse Reintroduction Programme. Ian had said this wasn’t brilliant habitat for dormice because these ancient pollarded hazels have become so thick and are spaced quite far apart so there isn’t much food or a thick enough understorey of scrub, honeysuckle and bramble.
And then one of the volunteers finds a dormouse! We all crowd round. Katie gently lifts him out of his grass and moss-lined nest inside the box. He is curled into a tight ball, eyes shut, fluffy tail wrapped across his tiny body. Katie prises his tail away to look at his bottom — she thinks he’s a male — and then puts inside a plastic bag to weigh him. He’s only 11 grammes. This is the same weight as two 20p coins. Normally dormice weigh 20g and need to weigh 15g to survive. Katie thinks this little fellow is light because he might be from a second litter so he must have been very young when he went into hibernation.
Throughout all of this, the dormouse remains asleep. When I lean in closely, I can hear him snoring: a little high-pitched whistling wheeze (if you put the sound up on the video below, you can listen to him too!).
All together we find eleven dormice in this part of the wood. I hope next time I join the volunteers, we find more. And they’re a little fatter.
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How lovely Sanjida! Those dear little things...