The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3034 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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Once the car was parked, the VW shove your van or whatever, we all piled out, that is Trish, Hannah, and Danielle. Livvie and Meems didn’t want to come, even though I suggested there might be opportunities to photograph things—like dormice. Livvie turned me down so Trish brought her camera, a small Nikon thing but it takes good pictures and the battery was charged—it helps. I’ll never forget seeing spider webs all covered in frost one winter, and rushing out with my camera only to discover the batteries had gone all yucky. It was never quite the same again and I ended up buying a Canon SLR, digital variety, which I still have.

We pulled on our bags, mine a rucksack, as was Trish’s and Danni’s but Hannah had an across your body satchel type bag. I made sure everyone had a bottle of water, given it was still warm and we had the rest of the ‘mousing’ kit, a large clear plastic bag, a small bag for weighing, my little balance which weighs up to 50g together with a hand lens, a torch and a mirror with some cloths to act as bungs.

For those who’d forgotten the process, I went over it as before. They put the bung in the hole at the back of the box or cover it with a hand. They’ve all got smaller hands than me, and I have small ones, so the bungs will be used. So stuff the bung, slide the lid of the box enough to see inside. Any nest material and they call me and we take the box off the tree, take the lid off, search the box for inhabitants and if there are any, sex them, weigh them and see if they’ve been chipped—I have a pit tag reader (same as they use for pets). We make a note of the box number, the sex and the weight of the individual and if there’s a chip, that number too. It’s the only way you can prove an individual animal because dormice move around much more than we thought. According to colleagues in Belgium, they even cross roads and railway lines without the use of dormouse bridges.

Once everything has been recorded, I use paper it’s easier to see what you have than talking into a smart arse, I mean phone, the animals are replaced in the box, which is replaced on the tree and the bung removed. It’s so easy to forget them and that could trap the mouse in the box which would then starve to death.

Hannah and Trish would struggle seeing inside some boxes and I did think about bringing a small ladder I have, but on uneven ground, they’re probably more trouble than they’re worth and potentially dangerous—I mean the child could fall and pull the box on top of them—they’re quite heavy—and hurt the dormice inside. So we didn’t use it. Instead, Trish came with me and Hannah with Danielle and we worked quite close to each other.

I put the boxes up over a whole winter, marking the tree with some coloured plastic ribbon, which doesn’t fade too quickly in any sunshine. I also mapped the site with GPS and marked each coloured row on the map. That took me a week to do, the machines were slower than nowadays, and also much dearer. I had to plead with Tom to borrow it. Now, Trish could do with her iPhone in a day (if the battery lasted).

We’d done about thirty boxes before we struck lucky. Trish found a nest and while we were dealing with it, so did Hannah. They bunged theirs, made a note of the number and came to see what we had.

Dormice nests are usually woven into cup shapes but not always. Usually they won’t use a box after a wood mouse has used it, especially a yellow-necked one—they kill dormice given the chance—but every so often you find that dormice will use an old wood mouse nest. The wood mouse isn’t very house proud and just collects loads of leaves, sometimes moss as well, in fact almost any old debris they can find and use it to nest in. Bank voles usually use lots of grass—looks like someone emptied a mower in the box—and blue or great tits usually have feathers in the moss and other stuff they use. Wrens despite their small size, make a huge domed nest, which I’ve seen used afterwards by dormice, wood mice and bank voles.

Ours was a false alarm, but I let Trish check it, after rolling up her sleeve—actually she had short sleeves already but once she’d said she was going to check the nest, I told her to roll up her sleeve and she started to before giving me a daggers look. Danni thought it was hilarious, but then teenagers do, everything is funny except them, they’re all in mortal agony for anything from having to get up too early, to not being allowed to get drunk at a school dance.

She checked the nest and out popped a wood mouse. Thankfully it was alone and after removing the box, I carefully tipped the bag into it re-depositing its startled resident and we popped the lid back on. Then it was back on to the tree and we went to examine Hannah’s box.

I asked Trish where her bung was, she blushed and ran back to get it. It’s such an easy mistake to make, I did it so often I stopped using them unless it really requires one, such as the box doesn’t want to come off the tree. For recalcitrant boxes you need two hands free, hence the bung.

We did the same with the box as before and this time, with Danni doing the search—Hannah would do the next but was afraid it might tickle and she’d drop the dormouse, we had one of our target species—see I am a scientist. If it is dropped, as long as it’s inside the big bag, it doesn’t matter, they’re so light they don’t get hurt and are quite used to falling from much higher distances.

We had a nice plump female. I showed them how to sex the animals and we weighed her—22g, quite a good weight but she may be pregnant. Danni put her back after we checked her for a pit tag, she already had one so that was noted as well as its number.

After a hundred and fifty boxes, we had six adults and two broods of babies, four in one and five in the other. I handled all the babies—they are so easy to damage—and you have to have the box resting on the ground inside the big bag in case you drop it and squash the unfortunate critter.

On the way home we stopped at a cafe and after washing hands, had tea and a cake before driving home for lunch. We’d been walking about for three hours so I felt we’d burned off the calories already.

“That was really good fun, Mummy,” said Hannah our dormousing virgin.

“I’m just glad you enjoyed it and saw the baby dormice,” which Trish had captured for posterity on her camera SD card.

“They were lovely, Mummy.” Oh well another addict in the making.