The case of the disappearing dormice
In the first of a three-part series, Joe Shute highlights the British wildlife facing extinction
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a creature that spends three-quarters of its life asleep, when I finally encounter a dormouse in the wild, it is in a state of blissful repose. The tiny rodent is curled up in a ball that fits neatly in the palm of my hand. One pink foot is stretched akimbo, while the curved hairy chestnut tail twitches with each deep breath. If you listen carefully, you can hear it snore.
This is the dormouse of popular imagination: the somnolent rodent that dozed through the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and inspired Beatrix Potter (who kept one as a pet). In the Victorian era, dormice were a favoured companion of schoolchildren, who used to stow the sleeping creatures in their pockets before releasing them after dark.
Nocturnal and arboreal – meaning they forage for food in trees – slumberous and secretive, dormice have long been one of the greatest delights of British nature. In the modern era, however, they are coming to represent something very different.
Dormice populations have plummeted by 72 per cent since 1995, and in 2016 were declared extinct in 17 English counties. The rodent is now classified a priority species of conservation concern – among the one million animal and plant species threatened with extinction in the modern age, as highlighted in a major UN report last week.
A separate recent joint study by the Mammal Society and Natural England warned that one in five British mammals are at risk of extinction, with the future of many populations of birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians looking similarly bleak. The UK is now classified as one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth.
Ask yourself: when was the last time you heard a cuckoo call, or drove down a country lane, requiring you to clean insects off your windscreen?
When did you last see a common frog in the garden pond or a hedgehog rootling in the undergrowth? Today, The Daily Telegraph is launching a three-part series highlighting the plight of some of our most cherished species of wildlife, and examining what can be done by us all to help arrest the decline. On first impressions, on a warm early spring day in the North Downs, in Surrey, all is well in the county known as the Garden of England. Chiffchaffs belt from the tops of old oaks whose new leaves are a brilliant emerald green. Electric yellow brimstone butterflies – among the first of the year to hatch – flutter in grass verges.
But look closer, urges Fanny Calder, director of UK campaigns at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the picture is very different. “We are losing species and many of our iconic landscapes are dying in terms of wildlife,” Calder says. “Here, it feels like an idyll, but the richness is not there and that is a sign of a more worrying trend.”
With our country having lost an estimated 56 per cent of its wildlife since 1970, the WWF is one of a number of organisations calling for greater protections to be included in the forthcoming Environment Act. On June 26, it is joining a mass lobby at Westminster designed to urge MPS to act faster to address the biodiversity crisis.
The dormouse, a century ago prevalent in every county in England and Wales, is a victim of many of the existential threats facing Britain’s
The UK is now classified as one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth
wildlife: in particular, habitat loss and climate change. It requires unbroken swathes of ancient woodland in which to breed, weaving delicate nests out of strips of honeysuckle and bluebell stalks, and has evolved in tune with the rhythms of the seasons.
But in recent years, the typical hibernation period of the dormouse – from October to May – has significantly changed due to the seasonal disruptions of climate change. Warmer, wetter winters pose a particular challenge as dormice have started waking up prematurely when no food is available. Lacking oil in their fur, they fare badly in the rain; a creature that loses one third of its body weight during hibernation cannot afford too much of a soaking.
As with so many other species, the loss of ancient woodland up and down the country had a severe affect. Hedgerows are similarly crucial in order to allow corridors for them to roam. “If you have dormice in a woodland, it shows it’s a healthy woodland,” says Julie Mottishaw, co-founder of the Surrey Dormouse Group. “They are a flagship species.”
Surrey – England’s most-wooded county – remains one of the last dormouse strongholds. Since its inception in 2008, the Surrey Dormouse Group has established 24 monitoring sites containing 1,200 nesting boxes, although Mottishaw admits dormice are now absent from many of these locations. In the most recent available record for 2017, the group counted 741 dormice – 36 lower than the previous year and which may include counting the same animal more than once.
The woodland where we choose to search some of the nesting boxes is an ancient stretch of beech, oak and hazel. Flowers carpet the floor into which badgers have dug their setts.
According to Mottishaw, it was the conservationist Oliver Rackham who first pointed to the correlation between the decline in ancient woodland during the 20th century and the loss of dormice populations. The wealth of wildlife one encounters in such precious habitats makes a mockery, she says, of developers’ claims that they will replant what they cut down. “They may say they will take down 100 trees and plant some more, but by then it is already too late.”
Dormice are unlike other rodents in that they are scrupulously clean and far from prodigious breeders. The dormouse follows a similar life cycle to humans. They live around six years and are slow to have young. If one litter dies, Mottishaw says, then essentially a whole generation is lost.
Finding evidence of dormouse
habitation requires no small amount of detective work. A telltale sign, Mottishaw says, is searching for nibbled hazelnuts. Dormice leave a smooth inner ring and spiralling tooth marks on the outside of the nuts they gnaw.
During the perilous process of hibernation, dormice stay close to the ground, as the temperature change is less profound. But once awake for the year, they use the nesting boxes to sleep in during the day, before foraging in the canopy at night.
During these extended naps, dormice go into a catatonic state called torpor to conserve energy.
We search dozens of the nesting boxes and, save for a few, which have been colonised by nesting blue tits, there is no sign of the dormouse or any other life. It is only in the very last box we look at – number 49 – where we find a young male, sleeping in situ.
As this dormouse dozes, one hopes the rest of us can be roused into action. It is the simplest of creatures with so few needs in life and yet, at present, we are on the verge of eradicating every one. Next week: Air The birds vanishing from our skies