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Why glis glis may be lying low this year
By Giles Knowles
My sister-in-law, who lives locally, has been trapping glis glis one after the other. Of course they are trapped humanely and are driven to a beech wood several miles away where they are released. ‘Life’s a beech for the Edible Dormouse’.
I’m sure that you all know this, but the glis glis lives within a 15-mile radius of Tring, where it escaped from Lord Rothschild’s wildlife collection in 1902. While other introduced species such as mink, grey squirrels and muntjac deer (we get plenty of these as well!) spread like wildfire across Britain, no-one could understand why glis glis, over more than a century, spread only four miles.
Now researchers
in Italy studying the edible dormouse – so-called because the Romans used
to eat it as a delicacy – have found that it only breeds occasionally. Unlike
other rodents which produce one litter in a year, and often several, the
edible dormouse did so in only three of the eight years in which they were
studied. They live for about nine years.Like the Italian dormice, those that live around Tring inhabit beech woods, which provide the nuts the young glis glis need to fatten up for winter. The dormice then hibernate for six months.
Andrea Pilastro and colleagues at the University of Padua found that in the three summers that the dormice bred, the trees produced large quantities of beech nuts. In the five non-breeding years, the nuts were in short supply.
Researchers believe that the dormice can detect a specific chemical in the beech flower buds, signalling a good year for nuts. “If they detect that the chemical is present, they breed. If not they don’t,” Dr Pilastro said. Pheromones rule O.K.!
I may be wrong, but the nut situation doesn’t look too good this year so maybe our electricity cables and wires are good for another year. But the local residents will invade and there are plenty of the ‘wire-scrunchers’ about! Keep your ears alive, especially during the dark hours.