Nuts to dormice



Stuck for something to do this autumn? Why not spend a couple of hours scrabbling around on the forest floor, searching for chewed nuts? Not just any forest floor - you need to be under the canopy of a mature hazel coppice - and the nut you seek is a hollow hazelnut with a perfectly round signature hole. 

 This hazelnut is the holy grail of dormouse conservation. You'd be amazed how much you can tell from the marks on its shell.

Squirrels insert a sharp incisor and crack the nut apart. Woodmice like to hoard their nuts in secret stashes for the lean times in winter. Like bank voles, they leave distinctive bite marks on the shell. But the golden hazelnut hidden under leaf litter bears an almost perfectly round hole on its side with a smooth inner rim and tooth marks at a 45 degree angle to the hole.

a dormouse nut



Why so much fuss about a discarded, chewed nut? It's the only way to find out if dormice are living in the wood, without going to a lot of trouble and expense. These sleepiest of British mice are nocturnal and they scuttle around in the tree canopy. You are extremely unlikely to see one in the wild or find its nest. If you do find the remains of its dinner, you feel justified in putting up wooden nest boxes which at least some of the population will probably use.

Only then will you come face to face with the cutest critter in the woods and be able to weigh it, sex it and find out how many offspring it has.

 A few days ago we found seven dormouse nuts among hundreds of squirrelled shells on the floor of a hazel copse in Surrey, suggesting there is a viable population in the wood. On hands and knees, we sifted through damp leaf litter, disturbing spiders and woodlice and revealing buried fungi. Foxes must have wondered who had scraped so many patches of earth clean when they emerged into the wood that night. 



torpid dormouse

 Very soon now, the hazel dormouse will be curling up in a ball of leaves for its long winter sleep. It doesn't depend on hazel nuts to survive, so long as it has plenty of food from April to October: nectar, bugs, fruits and nuts. But it does need a connected habitat of woods and hedges and hazel coppice seems to suit it very well.








Reflections

Reflections

One of the reasons I started this blog was to give myself space to reflect on my experiences of nature and to share them with others. I took this photo in mid-June at a watercress farm in the Surrey Hills. It was a still, warm day and I had just seen my first wild dormouse in some woods nearby while checking nest boxes.



The woods were idyllic: a tangle of hazel coppice carpeted with wild flowers, including yellow archangels, and everywhere shafts of sunlight penetrating the canopy. And the dormouse we found was every bit as sleepy as the one in the teapot at the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland.



Somehow it was one of those serene summer days when everything seems to be in harmony and at peace. Beside the pond pictured above, I found a swan sleeping with its neck curled back along its body, looking as elegant at rest as in mid-glide across the water.

dormice

What could possibly be cuter than a dormouse - even when it's gazing longingly at its woodland home through a plastic bag. That round face with apple-pip eyes, big ears and twitching whiskers - all designed to find food at night. Their paws have little sticky pads which help them cling to the thinnest of twigs as they scuttle through the canopy.

Don't be alarmed: this business with the bags is standard practice for weighing mice during monthly monitoring checks, all done by qualified and experienced licence holders who carefully return the animals to their nest box unharmed a few minutes later.

Today we were checking boxes in hazel coppice stools along a woodland edge in southern England. We found seven dormice in total, scattered among 50 boxes, including a female with "pinkies" (newborn young, which we left undisturbed), a couple preparing to breed and a pregnant female. Dormice are clearly thriving here, despite their national decline, and small wonder when you look at the food sources around them: hazel trees bursting with ripening nuts, sprawling bramble covered with pink berries and a plentiful supply of insects.

Dormice are exceptionally lively at this time of year, even though they normally sleep during the day. As we tried to transfer them from nest box to weighing bag, they scampered and leapt around a giant plastic sack and tried to escape by running up our arms. Inside the box, they weave cosy nests with strips of honeysuckle bark and moss, on a bed of fresh green leaves. In its heart is a small cavity lined with soft dry grass for the breeding den.

They seem to favour remnants of ancient woodland on the site which offers a greater diversity of plants and insects. The wood borders a field of wheat where we spotted a roe deer among the corn, a silage heap popular with basking adders, and shelters a number of badger setts.

Of course dormice are quite capable of nesting without our wooden boxes. We put them up so that we can monitor population numbers and breeding activity on different sites. If you see one, please leave it in peace. Dormice are strictly protected by law, as a fast declining endangered species, and you need a licence to disturb or handle one.

Houses for dormouses

We spent yesterday morning putting up dormouse boxes in hazel coppice on a corner of wet heathland. Some 15 to 20 years ago a dormouse was found nesting in a bat box there, and since the habitat is good for dormice, we're hoping to find evidence that they are still around.

The hazel coppice stools were wearing their early spring jewellery - dripping with yellow catkins and sprouting tiny dark red flowers along their stems. Undoubtedly, the first herald of spring. For the first time this month, birds were singing constantly in the wood and we heard a buzzard call as it flew overhead.

We spotted bubbles of dark brown jelly fungus growing on a tree and I took a small piece home to identify with the help of my Roger Phillips fungi bible. After doing a spore print overnight and examining it closely again in daylight, I settled on Witches' Butter. What a wonderful name for a fungus covered in tiny warts. Not edible! We also picked up a freshwater mussel shell, possibly dropped by a mink, and I'm hoping to work out the species with a bit of online research.

Woodland is indisputably my favourite habitat - so rich in biodiversity. I hope some dormice find the nest boxes. I wonder what they make of them - a handy wooden box, with an entry hole pointed away from the prevailing winds, tucked into a favourite food tree, and connected to the canopy by trailing honeysuckle.