The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2985 by Angharad Copyright© 2016 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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The following Monday I set about organising my leaders team, and seeing as I was offering a two year contract, both the people I wanted were very interested. I asked them not to speak to others about the project whether or not they decided to join my team. I gave them a maximum of a week to respond after which I’d look to someone else.

Then I spent the rest of the day trying to firm up my provisional costings. I tried to see it as an opportunity to understand the phenomenon of hibernation in dormice knowing it would kill some and feeling quite ill about it. Yet the reality is that two thirds of dormice probably don’t survive hibernation. They do in my lab, but we spend a great deal of money making as sure of that as we can. Spike was probably about age seven when she died, I thought of her and a dream I had the other night when I dreamt I saw her sitting on Billie’s hand as if to say she understood the relationship I have with dormice and that I should use it to help conserve them.

In the wild they have a few problems, the high mortality in hibernation over winter being the major one. If food is abundant before the winter, and the winter isn’t too wet, they have a reasonable chance to survive to breed the following year and that’s the critical thing. At the beginning of the dormouse season, which is determined by temperature, so may be April in a warm spring or May if not and occasionally the weather is bad enough to delay emergence and moving about until early June. The numbers will be low with fewer adults available to breed after the winter. If there were more in the beginning, there’d be more babies around in midsummer and experienced mothers would get a second, possibly a third brood in before autumn became too cold and signalled hibernation.

The difficulty with late broods is that the mothers will stop feeding the young and possibly neither will have enough fat accumulated to survive the winter. One researcher I knew used to take underweight youngsters and try to fatten them up before the real weather started to give them a fighting chance, then he’d take them back to their own territory and release them when it looked warm enough for them to survive; though he required special permission to do that.

Feeling fed up with costings and the project, I called Dan to see how things were at the visitor centre. He felt quite pleased and had just put forward a draft plan for coppicing. He’d need my approval to effect major change but he was basing his theory on some work by Oliver Rackham who was one of the greatest woodland historians we’ve ever had. I met him very briefly at a seminar about woodlands where I was talking about my favourite subject—no not my children or Simon’s wealth, but dormice and how we preserved or conserved habitats which enabled them to thrive. Some coppicing is necessary though many woodlands receive none.

Then the question of hedges arises. Wildlife requires corridors to disperse or use as safe areas for travel, this is part of the function of hedgerows. Hedgerows are under constant pressure from farming as they take up space and harbour vermin. The same could be said about tractors. Obviously, we need some form of compromise whereby farmers make a living and also see the value of laying hedges properly not just flail cutting them and certainly not ripping them out. It is time and labour consuming to lay hedges and I think farmers should be compensated for it or even have some system of volunteers who can do it for them having been trained in the skills and safety requirements. People go on weekend courses to learn how to dry stone wall and lay hedges, so why not make use of their enthusiasm and improve the look and function of the countryside?

The problem is there are hedgerows and then there are hedgerows. Most of us are familiar with something that is about shoulder height, probably of one or two species and trimmed with flail cutters each year spring and autumn. The depth of the hedge is probably about a yard; in which case it’s a modern hedge, probably no more than twenty or thirty years old.

Ancient hedgerows may contain dozens of different species of tree and shrub and may be five yards deep enabling places for badgers or rabbits to burrow, dormice and other rodents to thrive and weasels and other predators to hunt. They may be hundreds of years old or remnants of even older woodland They need standard trees to allow larger birds to roost or nest. Some of these trees will form canopies that cross roads linking with trees the other side of the road and thereby forming further corridors for squirrels and dormice to move about for foraging or breeding. They are under great threat as farmers tend to remove the trees, possibly to avoid fallers in high winds. I would argue that it’s very sad that people in cars hit fallen trees or get hit by the trees, but the numbers are relatively low considering the kamikaze way so many people drive anyway, plus they help dormice and other small animals to survive. As there are too many people and not enough dormice, I don’t see why farmers should be pressured into removing trees, but then I’m biased, I want to see the world continue to support as many species as it can and at the same time I support the control of human population numbers which are currently out of control.

In fifty years time there will be another one or two billion people on this planet. How are we going to feed them and where will they live? The world is finite as are its resources and the rate we’re using them up there will be real problems in fifty years time for raw materials for energy and manufacture of everything we use from housing to food packaging. We cannot go on as we are or the only wildlife we’ll have will be houseflies and cockroaches and as Joni Mitchell said the trees will only be in tree museums.

Obviously she painted a very bleak view but the problem is that species which struggle to survive in good times will certainly fail under pressure from the two legged rat that destroys all before it and calls it progress.

I arranged with Dan that he’d email me the plans for coppicing and I’d let him know my decision within days. Most of it would be done in the winter, though they’d have to be careful not to disturb hibernating dormice, who sometimes build nests under debris at the bases of trees. In the old days, coppicing was done on a twenty or thirty year rolling cycle. I’d like to see it return in many woodlands and to see if it has any affect upon populations of mammals, birds and insects like butterflies.

We’ll sell the wood as firewood, bean sticks and materials for making hurdles for fencing. It doesn’t make that much but it all helps.