The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1158 by Angharad Copyright © 2010 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

After making a spectacle of myself in the pub, snorting orange juice and lemonade everywhere, I wasn’t best pleased when Simon bought himself and the girls another drink. I sat there glowering at mine to which he’d said he’d added a double vodka. Of course he hadn’t, it was a wind up which he admitted when he came back from the bar.

I frowned at him for the rest of our stay, which they say is not a good thing to do as it uses more muscles than smiling and encourages wrinkles. The way this lot were going, I’d be a grey haired old lady by thirty.

Of course the girls were happy to have another coke, and to flirt with the young men in the pub, then hide behind the robust figure of Simon, who is over six feet tall and broad with it–brick sh**house comes to mind–and as an ex-rugby player, he’s quite useful in physical matters. I always feel safer when he’s with me. I suspect the two teens felt the same, because once or twice I had to caution them not to lead the men on or Simon and I would go on by ourselves.

We left the pub about ten o’clock and I hoped the baby would be good tonight because I seemed to be developing a headache, which is something I don’t usually get. By the time we got home, my head was pounding and I excused myself, took some aspirin and went to bed.

I felt rather than saw Simon coming to bed, and of course had to drag myself out at five to feed the vampire infant. Thankfully my headache had passed by then although I didn’t feel brilliant and I had a dormouse survey to coordinate–wonderful.

The little bugger kept falling asleep as she fed, and I had to wake her half a dozen times during her feed. I gave her a bit of Farex rice mixed with cow’s milk and she swallowed it down. Then after changing her and bathing her, it was pretty well time to get up anyway.

I had a relaxing bath, taking my tea and the baby with me, she sat in her bouncer seat, a recliner thing which has a mobile hoisted above it on a thing like a fishing rod, so as she bounces it dances about and she giggles and bounces some more.

I relaxed in the warm soothing water, to which I had added some smelly bath lotion stuff I’d got the Christmas before last, I also shaved my legs while I was in there. Simon staggered through half an hour later for a wee and muttered something.

I dried myself off and expressed some milk, which had collected quite quickly, mind you I had just had a drink, which helps. I dressed, took the milk downstairs to the fridge and then got the girls up. Julie was going to work, Phoebe, Trish and Livvie were coming with me ‘mousing’ and Danny would be playing football, which Simon would go to watch, taking Billie and Mima with him. Jenny would look after the baby and I expected to be home about lunch time if it all went well.

I did a quick breakfast and then went off to check my equipment. My scanner for the micro-chipped animals, my little balance for weighing them, a notepad and pencil for recording things, a torch, a penknife a bit of string and so on. Then a few thin plastic bags for weighing the mice and a couple of large see through ones for catching them from the nest box.

I decided I wasn’t going to chip any today, so those we caught which hadn’t been done would have to be recorded as such. I’d also got permission to remove any which were under weight, and for that we decided fifteen grams, and even that was pushing it–I’d have been happier with twenty. So I had some tape for sealing any boxes we took back with us plus their occupants.

I met up with the other mousers at the woodland and introduced my two girls. Another woman had brought her son, so we had three kids to watch out for as well as everything else–but at least the kids were all old enough to walk.

We had two licence holders in our group, which comprised four adults and three children counting Phoebe as an adult, and we had twenty five nest boxes to check–all of which I’d set up myself over the previous two or three years. The other groups would be checking similar numbers of boxes, which all told were about a hundred and twenty over five sites.

We split into two groups of two adults, thankfully the woman with her son went into the other lot. I set the protocol for the survey and Chris, the other licensee agreed we’d remove any underweights, he had a balance and microchip reader with him too.

The girls followed me and in our six nest boxes we had two nests but no occupants. We did a second line and had similar success. Chris had found two dormice and one woodmouse but the best was for last. In the last box we checked a weasel popped out–yeah, I know, pop goes the weasel, but when they do it makes you jump.

“What was that, Mummy?” asked Livvie.

“A weasel.”

“What was it doing in there?”

“It might have been resting or hunting.”

“Hunting, what does it hunt?”

“Anything small enough to kill or slow enough to catch.”

“Like dormice?”

“Sadly yes, they’ll kill any they find and eat them, but they also catch things like rabbits.”

“Rabbits, but they’re much bigger, Mummy.”

“Tell that to the weasel, they are ferocious predators and punch much above their weight, so do stoats, although they’re bigger than weasels, probably twice as big, and then there’s polecats too, although they tend to occur in the west of the country and they sometimes interbreed with ferrets. All of them are members of the badger family.”

My two were finally impressed by my wit and wisdom until I stepped into a rabbit hole and went rolling down the hill into a bramble patch. It shook me up, they screamed and the other adults had to help me extricate myself from the murderous thorns of the brambles. Fortunately, I was okay and once back to the cars, I had a quick coffee from my flask and felt well enough to continue, although I expected to find some bruises when I next sat in the bath.

At our second site, the same team did forty boxes, this time we did have some dormice, fortunately all above the desired weight–one male actually weighed in at nearly fifty grams and was too fat to escape the entrance hole, he just sat there like a little furry, black-eyed Buddha.

Trish and Livvie got to handle one each, and I showed them how to weigh the mice and check for a microchip with the scanner, which is like a banana with a LCD display up near the top, we call it the electronic banana. It’s brightly coloured for obvious reasons, as it’s put down in long grass and bushes, in poor light and needs to be found–they’re also not exactly cheap to buy, either.

It was half past one by the time we finished, Phoebe had stuck with the task throughout, and had been more of an asset than a hindrance, so I told her she was welcome to come again. She too had handled a dormouse–well, let’s face it if you let people do something, they remember the experience–and she was actually quite good at it. So when I told her she’d be welcome again, she told me she’d like that.

The ankle I’d twisted the other week was now playing up a little and I was glad to get back to the car and get home. once I took my boots off, it would swell like crazy, which I suppose serves me right for not looking where I was walking. At least I only rolled into a bramble patch, Alice fell through the rabbit hole into a parallel universe–mind you some days when I see what happens in this world, I do wonder if I might have done an Alice, because so little of what goes on makes sense to me.