The Rise of the Dormouse - Britain's endearingly sleepy hazel dormouse is the focus of energetic rescue efforts

International Wildlife, May-June, 2001 by Tara Mack

The dormouse in Patrick James' hand is not living up to its reputation. It doesn't seem to appreciate that it has an image to uphold, an image cemented 135 years ago by Lewis Carroll in the famous tea-party scene in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.

"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least-at least I mean what I say- that's the same thing, you know."

"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same as 'I eat what I see'!". . .

"You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same thing as 'I sleep when I breathe'!"

"It is the same thing with you," said the Hatter.

With Carroll's help the dormouse has become, as one conservationist phrased it, "an icon of sleepiness." To conserve energy, it sleeps during the winter, sleeps during the day and even sleeps during the summer hours when it is supposed to be awake, if weather conditions or food supply are poor. Its torpor is so sound that when it is handled, it struggles neither to fight nor to flee but simply to return to its slumber.

Usually.

But the dormouse James is holding is wide awake. It squeals and pumps its tiny feet frantically as he pinches it by the scruff of its neck. It has taken James, an ecologist, and his colleague Gen O'Farrell nearly an hour to find this dormouse-an hour of wading through ankle- high bramble in Tunbury Wood in southeastern England. James and O'Farrell have spent the morning peeking inside more than two dozen nest boxes conservationists erected with the hope that one of these allegedly sleepy creatures (the mouse's name derives from the French word dormir, meaning "to sleep") would bed down.

A reputation for docility does have its advantages. The dormouse's dwindling numbers in Britain earned it the protection of European laws and a place in an English conservation group's endangered species recovery program. And its gentle nature, cuddly appearance and literary fame garnered public support for efforts to protect it. So when the government decided to cut a swath of Tunbury and some adjacent woods to expand a major highway, it took the trouble to ensure that the dormice- and part of the forest itself-were both moved to new locations nearby.

James and O'Farrell work for Cresswell Associates, an environmental consultancy that was hired to monitor the move. They are here to see how the dormice are getting along in their new home. As he stills the dormouse's quivering long enough to examine it, James makes a surprising discovery. "It's lactating," he says.

Suddenly this routine inspection takes on an air of excitement. The rodent's nocturnal habits and its small population make sightings rare. Finding adults is difficult enough. Finding babies would be nearly miraculous. James reaches into the box and pulls out a nest. Inside the carefully woven leaves and fibers is a cluster of five hairless, thumb- tip-sized baby dormice. "They're gorgeous," O'Farrell coos.

Few mice enjoy the kind of affection that the dormouse inspires. "It's not like any other mouse," says Valerie Keeble, head of the People's Trust for Endangered Species. "It's a golden-brown color, and it has a furry tail. The reason most people don't like mice is because they've got slimy tails. But the dormouse is beautiful. It's got lovely big dark eyes and is not slimy at all."

The dormouse in James' hand is a hazel dormouse, Britain's only native species. There are roughly 500,000 in Britain, concentrated in a swath of land that stretches across the southern coast of England, with a few patches in the north and along the Welsh border. It has several cousins on the continent, including the edible dormouse, the garden dormouse and the forest dormouse.

The dormouse is a delicate creature-a fussy eater, reluctant traveler and a discriminating homemaker. It turns up its nose at common foods like leaves and will only eat certain flowers, fruits, nuts and insects that it finds in treetops and shrubs. The advantage to such finicky tastes is that there is less competition for these foods than there is for grass and leaves. The disadvantage is the dormouse needs a habitat with a diversity of plant and insect species to survive.

Add to that the dormouse's territoriality and you have a species in which each member has to stake out a relatively large patch of land. Generally dormice live at densities of only about 2 to 3 adults per acre. The population of the bank vole, a similarly sized rodent, often exceeds 50 per acre. Dormice are made even more vulnerable by their unwillingness to travel. They will not cross open ground, like farmland, to reach new habitat. They will only move through hedgerows, woods or other cover.

But there is at least one threat the dormouse doesn't need to worry much about. Its nocturnal and arboreal habits combined with its low densities mean that it has no major predators. Dormice are simply too difficult to find to be useful prey, according to Tony Mitchell-Jones, an ecologist with English Nature, a government conservation agency.