This is our latest homemade bit of kit thanks to Simon’s ingenuity. It’s a new and improved Dormouse hairtube. When we’re surveying for Dormice we generally try to find evidence of them feeding on hazelnuts. But of course if there are no hazel trees then we’ll find no nuts, but there may well be Dormice tittering at us from the undergrowth nonetheless. So, we use temporary nest tubes - just day shelters we can tie up in likely spots and check in the day when any animals that may have made use of them from the night before will still be in there snoring. This can take a while to get results but is if you like the ‘industry standard’. As a quicker supplement to this hair tubes are often used. These are lengths of plastic drainpipe baited with peanut butter (we think they prefer crunchy) and cut to allow 2 strips of sticky tape to run across the diameter. The theory is that the hungry/greedy Dormouse will squeeze under the tape to get to the bait and in doing so will leave behind a few hairs stuck to the tape. We then come along and check any hairs under a microscope to see which mammal they might be (could be mice or voles too). It sounds like an instrument of torture but the tape’s not that sticky, so they don’t come out bald. The trouble has been that clever Dormice can just as easily run across the top of the tape, so Simon has devised a tube where there is sticky on both sides and the tube is positioned so that the tape is vertical and the animals have to squeeze past one side or the other come what may. Good thinking. We’ll be testing these out this month.
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