As I sipped my coffee this morning, I watched a mother garden dormouse (Eliomys quercinus) attempting to carry one of her young up to her nest in the eves of my house. She wedged herself between the wall and a drain pipe and scrambled upwards with the pup squeaking loudly.It had rained over night and the wall and drain were both very wet. Consequently when she got about half way they would both slip and tumble back to the ground – a fall of about 5 feet. Undeterred she tried again and again. I decided to intervene and build her a rope ladder to make it easier but when I returned there was no sign of her so I assume that she eventually made it to the top. I have seen garden dormice a few times. Sadly the first one I found was dead, it having made its nest under the engine cowling of my lawn tractor. I found it after a few hours of mowing when I lifted the hood to check the oil and fuel – it had been pretty well cooked by then!
Dormice are typical mammals, being warm-blooded, furry, giving birth to live young and feeding them with milk. They are rodents, like mice, but they are not in the same family (Muridae). They have furry tails which may be why they seem a little cuter than house mice (Mus musculus). They are nocturnal omnivores although the bulk of their diet is usually animal protein. They eat large arthropods (beetles, grasshoppers, spiders), eggs, lizards, other small rodents, snails, berries and nuts. My garden is flush with all of those so I don’t expect they struggle for a good meal.
Unlike mice, the females only produce one litter of three to seven young each year. The young become independent after two months and will usually live for four or five years. The name dormice is thought to come from the French dormir – to sleep. This refers to the fact that they hibernate; when food is scarce over the winter months they go into a deep sleep to conserve energy until food is plentiful again in spring. The only other mammal I certainly have in my garden that does that is the hedgehog. If the bats that I sometimes see whirling away over my lawn after dusk are pipistrelle bats then they would also join the group of resident hibernating mammals.
Questions…
- Which other vertebrate group, apart from mammals, is also warm-blooded?
- What advantage(s) does hunting at night have for the garden dormouse?
- What special adaptations might the dormouse have to help it hunt at night?
- Beetles and spiders are both arthropods, what anatomical features do they share?
- How could you distinguish a beetle (or any other insect) from a spider?
15/08/14 Update:
I took this picture of mother and infant the other night.
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