Conservation and Monitoring of Hazel Dormice (part 1)

My name's Ian White, I work for the conservation charity People's Trust for Endangered Species as their Dormouse Officer and we're here in this wood at Taisley Woods on the Isle of Wight where we've come to do a Dormouse check for the National Dormouse Monitoring Program. So Dormouse are a fabulous indicator species of high quality woodland of high quality habitat and that's one of the reasons that they're very important and because they're kind of an arboreal species they move around in the tree and shrub canopy it's not just the woodland that they occupy it's also how do they disperse from that woodland while they need good hedgerows perhaps linear woodlands to connect other areas in the landscape so Dormouse can disperse from the woodland of their birth and move out across the wider landscape to occupy new areas of territory. So before you can set up an NDMP site you need to know you have Dormouse present and there's two ways of doing that neither of which require a license so one is by looking for hazelnuts have been opened by Hazel Dormouse so these will be a circular hole but the key thing to look for is the teeth marks on the cut edge of the hazelnut there'll be in a spiral rather than perpendicular inside the nut that will show you that this hazelnut has been opened by Hazel Dormouse. The other way is to use a footprint tunnel one here that's been out for for 24 hours and if we open it and look at the paper inside we can see there that there's the ink pad at the side here and the ink is olive oil and human grade charcoal and obviously that's the ink pad the animal steps on there and then steps on the the tracking paper inside and here we can see some Dormouse footprints they've got these triangular pads that show that Dormouse have investigated this tube and come in and we can then see that actually yes Dormouse are in this hedgerow because of these prints. Neither looking for hazelnuts nor using footprint tunnels requires a license and is a good way of showing Dormouse are present they generally work best in hedgerows or dense scrubby habitats. Dormouse are nesting there so from what I could see there was no Dormouse but there's evidence of Dormouse certainly in terms of these green leaves that have been picked from the tree and brought into the nest box so evidence of Dormouse but not a Dormouse yet. So it's a bit of an atypical Dormouse nest but there is some green leaves in there so we'll take this one off and have a look so we're going to do this to make sure if there is anything in this uh in this box it can't escape um we just want to count them here we want to weigh them and we want to sex them as well that's that first seat if there's anything interesting so take the lid out yeah a bit of an odd nest but there are some green leaves in here which suggest Dormouse I think we've got a Torpid Dormouse here yeah we have a Torpid Dormouse so this is like a mini hibernation state so when Dormouse go into hibernation they hibernate in the ground on the ground over winter between November and kind of mid-April they store food within their bodies and they use that to survive hibernation but we often find Dormouse in Torpa in the early part of spring and this is a mini hibernation they're usually going to Torpa because the weather's a and they haven't been able to feed but going into Torpa is all about saving energy because when they're like this it's not really sleep their body temperature will have dropped to the air temperature their heart rate will have slowed from about 300 beats per minute to about perhaps two beats per minute so it's all about saving energy from from a Dormouse point of view so we've set all the box up so they're ready for her to go back in so we're just going to pop her in the hole at the back and and she can settle down and and rest out the rest of the day before she comes out to feed tonight we've just done this one a little bit of a Woodmouse nest but let's have a quick look I think there is a Dormouse in there so we'll take that off and get that in a bag and have a closer look this one will probably wake up I've taken him out the box he'll probably wake up in the next 15 or 20 minutes but that's not a problem it's quite a nice day now there's plenty of food around so any energy he has lost he can quickly put back on again so we are still going to sex him we are going to weigh him looks a bit of a slightly chunkier animal to me let's see if we can find out whether it's a boy or a girl and it looks like what I can see it looks like a female female and you can see how gripping my fingers quite happily still a bit sleepy still slowly waking up feel it's tiny little claws just holding onto my finger there just showing how well adapted these animals are for a kind of a life in the trees if this is a Woodmouse it'd be jumping down to ground but it's not it's a Dormouse and these are currently designed to climb in the tree and shrub canopy so quite happy just hanging on there not feeling threatened at all so had a great day out in the woods checking a number of Dormouse boxes we've been fortunate in finding a few Dormouse we've found some in pairs so hopefully they will be having some babies later on in the year and obviously all the data we've had feeds into the National Dormouse Monitoring Program which gives us a state of the Britain's Dormouse population but there are other things we do to help Dormouse as well so we run training events for people wanting to know more about Dormouse we run landscape scale projects that help enhance habitats for Dormouse and for other species we fund research for things that can lead into and can help us with Dormouse conservation and we help and advise on woodland management and if you want to know more about that please see the next video in part two of this in the series