October 2013
We have just passed the autumn equinox, and the nights will now be longer than days until 21st March. It is interesting to note that the equinox is global. Everywhere on earth has equal day and night on about 21st September and 21st March.
For us locally, autumn means we are seeing the migrant birds such as swallows, house martins and chiffchaffs, flying south. Deciduous trees are deciding to drop their yellowing leaves, and the fruit trees, such as plums and apples, are burgeoning with harvest festival offerings. It is also a time for spiders as they mop up the remaining insects in their gossamer webs. Life is winding down for the winter.
However, autumn can also be a time of plenty, and a different kind of rebirth. I did my monthly dormouse round at Lake Wood yesterday, and besides some single adults in some boxes, I found a lovely family of five young dormice with their mother. They were still blind, but were just getting their orange fur which replaces the initial dark covering after about 14 days. Dormice are not actually mice (such as house mice, which are part of the family Muridae) but are in a closely related family called Gliridae (dormice). True mice do not hibernate, but the 20 or so species (globally) of dormice all apparently hibernate, sometimes for as many as 7 months of the year, they fatten up with autumn food before hibernating. We have only one species of dormouse in Britain, and that is the hazel dormouse. True mice have up to 10 litters each year of up to 14 young in each litter, but dormice have only one or two litters of up to 5 young. Dormice have furry tails, but true mice have long naked looking tails with just a few very short hairs. For the licensed recorder there are other differences, these are that dormice do not bite when handled, but true mice often do, and dormice do not foul their nests, but true mice are not house-trained, and make their nests increasingly smelly until even they have to desert them.
The nest-boxes that I establish for the dormice also host other species. These include yellow-necked mice, wood mice, blue tits, tree bumblebees, various wasps including hornets, ants, hunting and web-making spiders, woodlice, centipedes, various moths, earwigs, flees, hover and true flies, slugs, snails and various beetles.