Recently, the Friday gang of volunteer workers were in the Blean doing their usual winter work of coppicing trees and stacking logs. One of the team, Michael Thomas, noticed something unusual hanging on a branch nearby. He went to take a closer look and realised it was a dormouse. Suddenly it hopped onto his shoulder, as can be seen from the photos below. It was totally unexpected as dormouse aren’t usually active at this time of year.
The story has a very happy ending though, as the dormouse was taken to Wildwood, who are members of the National Dormouse Captive Breeders Group. They found she was a female and her greyish colouring indicated that she was still very young. She was also underweight for the time of year, so would have been unlikely to have survived the winter in the wild. They were very happy to add her to their dormouse population, so she will not only be well-fed and survive the winter, but will hopefully produce further generations of dormice to help Wildwood Trust with their research.
Further details of Wildwood’s Captive Breeding and Reintroduction Programme can be found at: http://www.wildwoodtrust.org/files/dormice-captive-breeding.pdf and photos of the dormouse, taken on the Deputy Warden’s phone are below: