The Dating Agency Saving Britain's Dormice

[00:00:00]So, the vision is to sort of get them back and doing really well in in all [music] the counties in the UK where they used to be found before they came extinct [music] and really to have them spreading out from these reintroduced populations and repopulating woodlands of their own accord so that [music] we don't have to put them out there. So, it would be nice to be made redundant and not have to breed dormice anymore in the future, but I think that's going to be quite a long time before we get to that stage.

[00:00:33]>> Hello and welcome back to the Rewilding podcast with me, your host Jack Cole.

[00:00:37]So, today I'm joined once again after a few years by Hazel Ryan, one of Britain's leading experts on dormice husbandry with over two decades of experience. So, she will share with us the exciting news from Wildwood Trust down in Kent where they have successfully bred a historic 37 individuals which have been prepared to be released and which have some of them have already been released in secret locations across the north of England. So, first of all, Hazel, welcome. Welcome back, I should say.

[00:01:05]Lovely to see you again and yes, so first, do you mind telling us why this project has become necessary for dormice?

[00:01:15]>> Yeah, well, sadly, dormice have declined by 70% since the year 2000 and they're now classed as vulnerable on the on the red list. So, we need to do something about that. So, so some recent research, which is just preliminary at the moment, by People's Trust for Endangered Species, one of our partners, and a university in Denmark has shown that by 50 years' time at the current rate, dormice will be completely extinct in the UK, which is really, really worrying.

[00:01:43]So, we really need to do more to get them back into the wild.

[00:01:48]>> So, and what have been the major causes or causes, I should say, of this decline?

[00:01:53]>> So, dormice require quite specific sort of habitats.

[00:01:58]Um, and it's really habitat loss, habitat degradation, so poor management of habitats, things like increases in livestock and deer which browse on woodlands um, and cause it to be less suitable for them because they really like a nice um, dense structure in the woodland. So, they like woodland that's been coppiced where there's a little bit of light that comes into the woodland floor and that means there's lots of flowers and fruits for them to feed on because that's what they like. Um, they use those plants for nest material um, and they not like to be able to move between the trees because dormice don't like to come down onto the ground.

[00:02:33]Um, so um, um, we've sort of lost a lot of that habitat, especially things like hedgerows. Hedgerows have been grubbed out um, and dormice need hedgerows to move from one woodland to another.

[00:02:45]Um, also climate change. So, um, dormice are very weather dependent animals. Um, they hibernate for most of the winter um, and they spend a lot of time um, in in spring in torpor and temperatures can really affect them.

[00:03:02]>> And in terms of the just a little bit of ecology, bit of background on the um, dormice themselves. So, you spoke a little bit there about the habitat. So, what's their sort of general um, life pattern in terms of lifespan, um, their breeding and how they forage?

[00:03:15]>> Yes, the dormice are quite different from other small mammals. Your average wood mouse maybe lives a year or two.

[00:03:20]Uh, it breeds every three weeks, can have litters up to 10. Whereas the dormice are much more slow breeders.

[00:03:26]Um, so they you can can sort of compare them in the plant world to like an oak tree. Grows very slowly um, but lives for a long time. So, dormice we know um, can live for at least five years in the UK, probably more because they can live for six years in Europe. Um, and we've had one in captivity now who is nearly 10 years old. Um, but they breed very slowly. So, they often only have one or two litters of young per year and on average four animals in each each litter. So, it takes them a long time to recover from anything that affects their population because they're breeding so slowly.

[00:04:04]But, it also means they do sort of learn. So, they the parents actually show the youngsters where to go and forage, where good places are to find food, how to get around in the woodland without coming down onto the ground where they're vulnerable to predators.

[00:04:18]So, yeah, they're quite different from our our other small mammals.

[00:04:23]>> And in terms of their foraging, you mentioned they like to stay up in the trees. So, what do they eat? What do they what do they foraging for?

[00:04:30]>> The dormouse have like a really primitive digestive system, which means they can't digest anything with cellulose in it. So, they can't eat sort of leaves and bark and grass like some other herbivores. So, they're looking for things which are easy to digest. So, that's pollen and nectar of flowers. So, in the spring, they'll be up in the tops of the trees looking for hawthorn flowers, elderflowers, even the flowers on oak trees in a woodland, hazel catkins if they wake up very early. And then as those flowers begin to finish, they then move on to insects. So, in the middle of the summer when there aren't any berries ripe yet, they will eat insects such as caterpillars, aphids they like as well, and galls. And galls are where you know, insects injects an egg into part of the plant and that little grub starts to grow inside the plant and and that's sort of one of their favorite foods as well.

[00:05:28]There are a few plants that do still flower through the summer in a woodland.

[00:05:33]So, things like honeysuckle and bramble.

[00:05:36]So, those flowers are quite important for them.

[00:05:39]And that ties them over till late summer when we start to get the fruits and berries appearing. So, brambles, blackberries, hazelnuts, uh chestnuts, um rowan berries they absolutely love.

[00:05:54]Um Um wild wild plums, wild cherries, all those sorts of fruits they eat. Um and they're really important for them because in in late summer, early autumn, they can convert the sugars in those fruits to fat.

[00:06:07]Because before they hibernate, um they need to lay down a lot of brown fat.

[00:06:11]They need to almost double their body weight um in the in the early autumn. Um so, all those fruits are really important for them. But, they can't eat acorns, unfortunately. They can't digest those.

[00:06:21]>> So, you you just touched on there that they need to hibernate. So, how long do they hibernate for? And as I understand it, their hibernation patterns have been affected by climate change.

[00:06:30]>> The dormice hibernate um throughout the the winter. And it's really triggered by day length and temperature. So, once we sort of start to get the first frost in the autumn, um around October time, uh they traditionally went into hibernation. And then they wouldn't wake up until around May time. But, we are finding now with the warmer autumns, dormice are staying awake a little bit longer.

[00:06:53]Um and also they're breeding later. So, if they produce a later litter of young, um those young won't be able to hibernate because they won't be heavy enough to go into hibernation in October. So, some of the youngsters are staying awake right until December to make sure they're heavy enough to hibernate. Um and also if we have a very mild spring, they might wake up a little bit earlier as well um in in March or April. And the difficult thing then is if the the trees haven't produced any flowers yet, they haven't got anything to feed on. So, that's a very vulnerable time for them in the spring.

[00:07:26]>> My intro, I I touched on that you've got plus decades of experience. So, you're one of the the forerunners um in the country, most likely. Um so, through that time and through the projects at at um at Wildwood is undertaking at the moment, how have things changed for the dormice in your time and leading into the project now? What are what are the What's the plan? What's what's the What's been going on? What the stages?

[00:07:50]>> So, we are breed dormice at Wildwood and they go towards the national reintroduction program, which is managed by the People's Trust for Endangered Species. Um so, at Wildwood, we hold the national dormouse studbook and that means we decide which dormice we get paired up for breeding. So, we look at their bloodlines um and their fitness and their age. Um and we also decide which dormice get put forward for release as well. So, we have to make sure the right genetic lines go to the right places and we get a nice um diversity of genes going to each site.

[00:08:24]Um and then we we pair up dormice, we keep them in enclosures.

[00:08:28]Um they breed and then the following year the young will go for release.

[00:08:33]Um this year we actually had Well, last year we actually bred a bumper number of dormice than we've had more than we've ever had before at Wildwood. Um and there was actually 37 dormice across our two sites in Kent and Devon. Um and they all went for the reintroduction this year, which was amazing.

[00:08:49]Um and that was at two different sites, one in Leicestershire and one in Warwickshire. And the way we do the releases has changed because we found that it's better to put some dormice at one site and then do reinforcement releases close to that site. So, there might be another woodland which is uh linked to that site via a hedgerow, for example. Um and so, we would reintroduce dormice into both sites and eventually they will meet on the hedgerow and they can mix. And so, we're looking at basically reintroducing them at a population um level on a on landscape scale. So, you're you're just not putting them in one little woodland which is isolated.

[00:09:27]You're trying to encourage them to spread out across the landscape um and repopulate other habitats and other areas uh and restore them because um they did become extinct from 20 um counties in the UK at one point.

[00:09:43]>> And so, what's the long-term goal with dormice? What's the grand vision?

[00:09:47]Perhaps in maybe 5 10 years from now, could we uh hope to see?

[00:09:52]>> So, the vision is to sort of get them back um and doing really well in in all the counties in the UK where they used to be found before they came extinct and really to have them spreading out from these reintroduced populations um and repopulating woodlands of their own accord so that we don't have to put them out there. So, it would be nice to be made redundant and not have to breed dormice anymore in the future, but I think that's going to be quite a long time before we get to that stage.

[00:10:19]>> Okay, and as I understand it, there's some opportunity um be it monitoring or otherwise for the public to get involved. So, how might people find involved with uh perhaps offer them time, volunteer, or what could um our audience basically um what could they do to support the work?

[00:10:39]>> Um so, um we do have uh training courses to make the public more aware of of these animals um of all small mammals really. Um we offer training courses as well for ecologists who are training for the licenses and volunteers who want to go out and survey dormice. Um they can come on training courses with us. Um and there's a national dormouse monitoring program. So, um throughout all the counties where where dormice are found, um there are volunteers that go out every month and they check nest boxes to monitor their local populations. So, people can get involved with that as well. Um they can make a donation towards our project through our website um and they can they can look at all of our our social media channels to see uh what we're doing with our dormice cuz we put regular updates on there as well.

[00:11:26]>> Fantastic, and I'll leave all the relevant links below.

[00:11:28]Hazel, thank you so much for your time.

[00:11:30]It's lovely you to see you again.

[00:11:32]>> Thank you.