The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 3010 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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An interesting story appeared in the papers suggesting that the true picture of global warming and the rise in sea levels had been masked by the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 and that the rise in sea levels was happening much quicker than they had previously thought. Glad I don’t own lots of property in New York or London as both will be threatened eventually.

It appears that humpback whales are affected by the noise from shipping and it disrupts their feeding patterns and the increasing consumption of avocado pears by Americans is causing Mexican forests to be cleared by farmers to produce them. Perhaps healthy eating is bad for you after all, not that I like them anyway, like greasy raw potatoes.

I was at the university having cycled in because it was suggested that a rat had been seen in the outside enclosure we have for the dormice. Those we are going to release we try to acclimatise to being outdoors. They have nest boxes and are fed from a variety of feeding tables fixed to trees, which is what they’ll meet when they’re released. We have volunteers attend every day for a month and top up nuts and bits of dried fruit. There’s a dozen dormice in the enclosure and they are due to be moved at the end of the week to some woodland on the reserve.

We then take them in nest boxes and attach them in a ring of trees around the ones to which the feeding trays had been attached. The amount of food we leave out will decrease over the month and as the animals have been chipped with an RFID (Radio Frequency Identifier) sometimes called a PIT tag (Passive Integrated Transponder) which means when we check the nearby nest boxes each week, we can scan the mouse and check which one it is. Obviously scrupulous records need to be made for this.

At least ninety percent of the mice make it to the autumn and are heavy enough to get through hibernation though so far not more than fifty percent were identified the following year as having survived the winter. This possibly sounds bad but the reality is that up to two thirds ie over sixty percent usually die during the winter or shortly afterwards. This is possibly due to such things as a mild spell causing them to wake up and then find there’s very little food about or another cold spell kills them before they can hibernate again. If they do manage to hibernate again, then possibly the second time they won’t have enough fat to keep them going and they effectively starve to death while in torpor.

Some will be predated by a variety of things from badgers, foxes or even rats and wood mice and others will perish because of rain or other environmental factors. Dormice however, only breed once a year usually unlike true mice which seem to reproduce faster than a Xerox machine, so numbers if badly affected by a winter or poor summer, may take some years to recover. It’s one of the reasons they’re a protected species in most of Europe, including the UK and licences are required to handle or disturb them. The licences are usually issued to scientists or academics for the purpose of studying them and to volunteers who help to monitor numbers in the wild, often on regular sites which have nest boxes or tubes for nesting in.

Licences may also be granted for those who need to move dormice for some reason like building development or infrastructure works. Recently I heard that Bristol Water had paid a small fortune to quantify the risk to dormice in moving a hedgerow to facilitate a new water pipe linking two reservoirs. Clearly such work is justifiable although they would still need to get approval from Natural England to do it in the form of mitigation licences. If they don’t they could be fined quite significant sums of money or somebody imprisoned. Which is good, however, it seems that several golden eagles have disappeared over the past few years near to estates with grouse moors and interestingly, the birds were wearing a transmitter harness. It appears that the transmitters stopped working as the birds disappeared. While there’s no direct evidence the coincidence is so high that one has to conclude that humans have been involved and the birds killed, possibly by shooting.

That they have never been found is one of the puzzling elements nor have the transmitters, which might be the case if they met with misfortune. The grouse shooters have an answer but usually it’s ludicrous. The real answer is that grouse shooting generates megabucks for the owners of the grouse moors and eagles and hen harriers are an inconvenience in that they may take some young birds to eat, whereas the majority of the birds slaughtered by men are dumped.

Back to our suspected rat in the external enclosure: the walls are made of toughened glass and buried into the ground, the door is an airlock type so nothing should get in or out while someone is entering to check the boxes. The roof is a wire mesh to stop birds getting in.

I checked around it with Sally, the technician who’d entertained my kids for an hour yesterday. As far as we could see the structure was intact and there was no way a rat should have got in there. But, rats are clever critters and one should never underestimate them, so between us we sealed all the boxes having checked them as alive and safe. We then removed them and combed through the enclosure finding no rat of any sort. The nest boxes were replaced and unstopped. Sally would check them tomorrow and for a few days to make sure no predator had got in.

While I was there, albeit in cycling kit, I checked out a few things with Diane and signed some more letters. I also read the Guardian on line as Daddy had my copy in his brief case. I saw the report of the golden eagles and also a previous one about a researcher from the US had tried to see how peregrines caught birds without stooping at them. It was very clever of the raptors. They fly parallel to the prey who after the initial shock seem to think the predators are either stationary or staying the same distance away, whereas in fact they’re not flying parallel any more but on a convergent trajectory. By the time they understand what’s happening, it’s too late and they’re the bird’s next meal. The research involved fixing cameras to the peregrines which were flown by falconers and done in a number of European countries and also the US. In England the film could not be used because some idiot farmer shot the peregrine.

It didn’t say if he was prosecuted or not. Personally, I’d have beaten him to death with his own gun and then for good measure shoved it where the sun don’t shine and fired both barrels. It’s a clear indication that guns should not be allowed in the hands of people who can’t tell a peregrine from a crow, or a hen harrier from a grouse (Prince Harry!).

After doing my duty, I rode home taking in a quick climb up the downs en route. At this rate I should be fit in a few decades. Back to the packing and the bedlam it creates.