Printer-friendly version
Author:
For this blog; I have used the title of something I saw when I was logging on to my Internet supplier.
An interesting article with some nice photos.
http://home.bt.com/news/sciencenews/how-can-we-save-our-enda...
How can we save our endangered dormice?
A word from our sponsor:
Comments
Thanks for that
I've added a comment to the article.
Angharad
Interesting Comments to the Article
They illustrate the wide spectra of ignorance about nature and ecology. At least a few were on the mark, as I'm sure yours was. I'm not sure which one it was.
Portia
The answer is simple.
Cats, dogs, gerbils, and hamsters are not endangered because we actively breed them. We can do the same for dormice.
A crowd-funded distributed breeding program would work well. Of course, the government would have to allow people to do it.
Yes, I know, I'm thinking outside the box. In fact, I'm thinking so far outside the box that people who are used to and comfortable with having the government run and control everything are likely to find problems with it.
But hey, once we 'seed' the organization with a few breeding pairs, we will have more than enough to overcome the inevitable losses that go with letting amateurs do the job. The fact is, the survival rate will likely well exceed the survival rate of wild dormice.
There are captive breeding
programmes in operation and releases in places as far apart as Cheshire and the Isle of Wight. Much of the stuff I write about dormice in Bike is actual fact.
Angharad
Captive breeding
I figured that captive breeding was actually happening. What I'm talking about is massively increasing the effort via volunteer labor.
Of course, if the habitat is going away, captive breeding is going to have limited results.