Country Life
Trending: Credit: Wild Dales Photography - Simon Phillpotts / Alamy
The dormice of Wensleydale will have a nice surprise as they awaken from hibernation this year, thanks to a major conservation effort over the past few months. Annunciata Elwes explains.
Two fledgling populations of native endangered dormice in Wensleydale should now be waking from their winter slumber to discover a bigger, wider world, as local landowners and farmers have completed a six-mile corridor of woodland and hedgerow either side of Freeholders’ Wood at Aysgarth Falls.
The three-year Wensleydale Dormouse Project, which is funded by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), Woodland Trust, Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and Millennium Trust, among others, is part of the PTES’s National Dormouse Monitoring Programme. Giving the populations room to roam is vital, as dormice are almost entirely arboreal and need to be able to walk along branches, hopping from on
LAND managers have spent the past three years planting, or bringing into ‘appropriate management’, hedgerows and woodlands either side of Freeholders’ Wood at Aysgarth Falls, where dormice were reintroduced in 2008. Farmers have even planted brambles – a plant they might usually regard as a thorny nuisance – in order to provide the mammals with late season fruit. Although now formally completed, the impact of the three-year ‘Wensleydale Dormouse Project’ will be monitored. Simple tubes, containing inked pads, have been hung in hedges to track how far the dormice spread out from their Aysgarth stronghold. “Local people have really taken to hazel dormice,” said project officer Phill Hibbs. “School children at Bainbridge studied them during lockdown, so they’ll know that the dormice are about to wake up from their winter torpor, while local landowners – particularly Stuart Raw at Hollins Farm and Tom Orde-Powlett of the Bolton Estate – have enthusias
Hazel dormouse in hand. Picture: Clare Pengelly WOODS and hedgerows across a 9.5 kilometre stretch of mid-Wensleydale have been connected to create an ideal home for the endangered Hazel Dormouse. Land managers have spent the past three years planting, or bringing into ‘appropriate management’, hedgerows and woodlands either side of Freeholders’ Wood at Aysgarth Falls, where dormice were reintroduced in 2008. Farmers have even planted brambles – plants they might usually regard as a thorny nuisance – in order to provide the mammals with late season fruit. Although now formally completed, the impact of the three-year ‘Wensleydale Dormouse Project’ will be monitored. Simple tubes, containing inked pads, have been hung in hedges to track how far the dormice spread out from their Aysgarth stronghold.