Last week we had hibernating snails and so it was a happy coincidence that one of the Biodiversity Group volunteers found a sleeping dormouse in his woodland garden at the weekend.
The little ball of orange fur was curled up, not in a Hatter’s teapot, but under a stack of flowerpots deep in hibernation in a nest woven from long grass. She or he is now tucked away somewhere safe from frost and disturbance.
The name dormouse, strictly speaking the UK species is the hazel dormouse, comes from the French dormir to sleep because you are unlikely to see one that is awake. They often hibernate for up to seven months of the year and even in the summer they are nocturnal, sleeping during the day and coming out to feed at night. Even then they rarely come down to the ground, being safer spending their time feeding up in the tree canopy.
Dormice usually live in deciduous woodland especially old style hazel coppice, and also in large dense hedgerows. Changes in woodland and hedgerow management have seen a serious decline in recent decades and they are now one of Britain’s rarest mammals. Restricted mainly to southern England, Devon is one of their strongholds, although even in Devon they are not as numerous as they once were. There are several sites around the Sid valley where they are known to live, but the sites are not advertised to avoid the danger of these shy creatures being disturbed.
Dormice are omnivorous and their diet changes with the seasons. When they wake in late spring they feed on the buds and flowers of trees such as hawthorn and hornbeam, and also on caterpillars and other insects through the summer. As autumn approaches they feed voraciously on blackberries and other fruits, especially hazelnuts which are rich in fattening oil. Dormice can double their summer body weight of up to 20g to 40g ready for the long months of hibernation.
During the summer and the breeding season, dormice build nests made of grass and strips of bark woven into a ball, usually up in the trees but sometimes lower down in the safety of dense thorny scrub. When it comes to hibernation, a nest up in a tree would be prone to frost and so the dormice come down and sleep under piles of leaves at the base of trees or even a little way underground, characteristically curled in a tight ball.
There are twenty nine different dormice around the world, but the hazel dormouse is the only one native to Britain. There is a population of the much larger edible dormouse, they used to be a delicacy in Roman times, in Hertfordshire where some captive ones were released from a Rothschild private menagerie in the early twentieth century. These are an invasive pest because they need to gnaw regularly to keep their teeth in line and they will ring bark and kill trees. If they take up residence in roof spaces they damage joists, pipes and electric cabling.
The much smaller native hazel dormouse does not cause any such problem. It is a rare occurrence but, if you do find one sleeping in a corner of your garden, please do not disturb it, waking from hibernation in the winter could prove fatal.
Image Attribution: Charles Sinclair
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