Hazel Dormice spend most of their lives in the woodland canopy, rarely going down onto ground level, other than to hibernate in a nest of leaves during winter. They favour deciduous woodland, hedgerows and scrub. So, we have always been aware that they are probably present on The Mound, now that the shrubs have grown to a reasonable size. A couple of years ago we put up a two boxes, but we did not expect to find some possible Dormouse nests during our Harvest Mouse Survey last week.
Feeding on nuts, berries and seeds, we have provided them with good food sources. As their name implies, hazelnuts are favoured and one way to survey for them is to do a nut hunt. PTES (People's Trust for Endangered Species) recommends that you survey hedgerow under hazel trees for any discarded nutshells. Each species nibbles or cracks the nuts in a different way. It is really quite fascinating! So we gathered together a handful of shells from just three of our Hazel bushes. After sorting through them, I selected those that looked most like tell-tale feeding signs of a Dormouse and sent photographs to Devon Biodiversity Records Centre at Devon Wildlife Trust for verification.
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| Dormouse-nibbled Hazelnut 1 |
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| Smooth inner rim of Hazelnut 2 |
Surely enough, it was confirmed that these three nuts showed the distinctive smooth interior and outer scrapings of a Dormouse. Some people have likened them to a small Dutch clog, because it opens up the nut from the side when they are still green.
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| Hazelnut 3 |
So now we can be sure we have yet another species to record in our small (quarter of a hectare) wildlife space. This brings us to 104 plant and animal species in 2022.
And here we captured on video the finding of the Dormouse nest in the brambles.
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