The word dormice comes from the french ‘dormir’ meaning to sleep as they are our only terrestrial mammal, apart from hedgehogs, that hibernate. Mice comes from the Greek ‘humus’ meaning of the earth and refers to many small brown animals. Dormice, unlike woodmice live at low densities so although where there is one there is likely to be more, there still won’t be very many.

Dormice, bank voles and woodmice all make round holes in hazelnuts. When looking for dormouse nibbled nuts the secret is to look at the direction of the teeth marks around the edge of the hole, they wil be parallel to the side of the hole rather than at right angles as made by bank voles and woodmice.

It use to be thought that cats rarely caught dormice but I have had at least three examples sent to me in the last two months. Unfortunately cats do have a huge effect on Britains fauna – in 2003 11,500 prey items were caught by 700 cats in five months, approximately 1 bird, mammal, amphibean or reptile killed by each cat every 9 days. So if your cat lives for 15 years it may kill up to 600 animals in its lifetime. And there are thought to be about 10 million cats in the UK.
So how to reduce the carnage – feeding your cat more won’t help; it will just make it a more efficient predator – but putting a bell round it’s neck may give potential prey a running chance and only letting it out at night will give our nocturnal mammals a feeding opportunity.
But if your cat does happen to bring in a dormouse please take a photograph and email it with your postcode location to PTES so at least we can find out if your cat has discovered a new dormouse population.

Ian White (Dormouse Officer)
Peoples Trust for Endangered Species

URGENT HELP required!