Following on from his talk last winter, Pat Morris invited members of the Society to join one of the monthly monitoring sessions of the Edible Dormouse nest boxes at Hockeridge Wood, a beech wood in the Chilterns near Berkhampstead. Five members spent a fascinating day there on Sunday 4th September. Four teams of surveyors were working in the woods. The team which the Reading group joined surveyed 20 boxes before lunch and another 20 after lunch. One of the team carried a ladder in order to be able to reach the boxes, which were suspended from fixed plates attached to trees. Most of the boxes were occupied, either by single adults, or by females with 1 to 7 youngsters, though the commonest numbers were 4-6. The animals were shaken out into a large polythene bag. The people who handled the dormice wore very thick gloves, since they have a strong and painful bite. First the adult would be extracted and scanned. All the adults had already been electronically tagged. The oldest one found had first been tagged 7 years ago, and had not been retrapped in 5 of the intervening years. The sex of the animal was recorded and then it was weighed, with the weights of the adults in the range 120 – 205 grams. Then the juveniles were checked to see if they had already been tagged. Any untagged specimens which were sufficiently large were then tagged. Most of the juveniles were weighed together in family groups, but a few were weighed individually. Their weights ranged between 36 and 60 grams. They were then returned to the nest box and the entrance hole was blocked with a fist-sized soft toy, while the box was being returned to the tree. A total of 32 adults and 72 juveniles were measured.
Pictures by Laurie Haseler