Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2010 | Page 97

country life

Island Life - October/November 2010

Photos: Various photos from
the dormouse Safari located at
Briddlesford Woods.

met at 2pm and were given a briefing
by Ian White, Dormouse Officer of the
PTES as to what to expect and what
to look out for. We learned that the
morning group had been successful
in recording several dormice and that
there were nests found with ‘pinks’,
very young babies, with no fur and their
eyes yet to open!
The dormouse boxes are attached
with wire at about three feet high, to
hazel stools. Hazel is one of the main
food sources of the dormice, along
with blackberries, wild honeysuckle and
hawthorn berries. Nuts and berries are
obviously only available for part of the
year, so pollen and insects fill the gap!
The boxes are spread over most of
the woodland and the coupe (defined
woodland area) we were heading to
was about twenty minutes walk. On
the way we stopped and Ian gave us a
bit of the history of dormouse research
and pointed out features of interest.

This was not a ‘set-up’ TV show, and
there were no guarantees that we
would record any animals, let alone a
dormouse!
This turned out to be the case in
the first coupe. Most of the boxes
where empty, or housed old, wood
mouse nests. There was a moment of
excitement, when one box, produced
a wood mouse, who when captured in
the plastic bag, began to wash itself, a
sign of insecurity or nerves.
A little dejected, we moved on to
the second coupe, another short
walk. This part of the woodland had
seen more recent active management,
with coppicing and canopy opening
taking place. There were four boxes
to inspect and after stumbling across
a cluster of very impressive fly agaric’s
(red topped toadstools with white
flecks) the last box uncovered the
perfect find! A fat dormouse, with a
litter of tiny pinks, probably only a few
days old and snuggled tightly in their
grass woven nest, surrounded by the
green leaves of the hazel bush.
Ian, very carefully negotiated ‘mum’
into a plastic bag (a safe and easy way
of inspecting and weighing dormice),
we all got to look into the nest and
have a close look at ‘mum’ in her bag.

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Laura Bower, Conservation Officer
also from the PTES, then weighed the
dormouse, making notes of where
found and that it had a young litter.
Content, we crossed the track to
another coupe and continued to inspect
the boxes. As it turned out, there
was still one more exciting discovery
to uncover. The next box revealed a
pigmy shrew, the only one recorded
that weekend! This specimen was a
little less co-operative, when it came to
sitting still, and when weighed, turned
out to be only six grams!
The afternoon was finished off with
tea and home-made cakes, and the
chance to 6