It was lovely to get back to the woods this weekend for my first dormouse session of the year. Box checks naturally come to a halt over winter (an advantage of monitoring an animal that hibernates), so it has been a few months since I last helped at a check.
Most dormice are still hibernating in March, so the focus of Saturday’s session was to clean and repair the boxes, ready for when the dormice emerge. We were a bit worried that we may have left it too late this year, with the warm weather meaning spring seems to be springing earlier than usual. But we didn’t find any dormice, and not many birds have started nesting in the boxes either.
We had a lovely day for it. Quite a contrast to most of the box cleaning sessions that I have done, where my hands become numb from cold within the first few minutes.
While we didn’t find any dormice, there were quite a few wood mice that had to be evicted from the dormice boxes.
Orchids and bluebells have already come up (although not in flower yet), while primroses and violets were blooming. I was expecting more trees to have come down in the storms, but not many appear to have been damaged, at least in the parts of the wood we monitor.
Anyway, the boxes are now clean and ready for dormice to occupy. The next check should be exciting.
Wild South 