Devon SSSI nature reserve and eco lodges - Maggie's Blog
21 November
A dormouse ready for its winter sleep...
This lovely plump dormouse has had an adventure and a lucky escape. My friend Wendy in the village accidentally disturbed a hibernation nest when restoring a very overgrown hedge and hacking back brambles. She rang me because she knew I'd got a bit involved in dormouse monitoring.
I thought she'd probably found an old birds' nest, or an unoccupied summer breeding nest, but when I arrived there was a pink foot sticking out of the characteristic woven bundle of grass dormice make for their winter sleep. We went inside to ring the North Devon dormouse expert for advice - but no answer. So we thought we'd try to put it back anyway. But by then it had woken up and I worried that if woken from hibernation it might not make it through the winter.
So the dormouse came home with me in a box, and spent the afternoon in a terrarium (previously home to the grass snake). Hence the pictures - by now it was properly awake and grooming itself.
I weighed the dormouse on my kitchen scales - a healthy 28 grammes. And I got hold of Jan Whittington for advice. She reckoned that, given its weight and the mild weather, the dormouse would have a good enough chance to re-build a hibernation nest and survive. So as dusk began to fall we took it back (we waited for near dark to make the dormouse less vulnerable to daytime predators like cats). We identified a patch of brambles Wendy was prepared to leave until next May, and let it go again. Fingers crossed it makes it to spring and doesn't fall foul of further garden restoration.