Ready to say “ahhh”? However long you have been surveying it’s always still a thrill to find dormice in your monitoring boxes and tubes. We were very lucky to find not one, not two, but three dormice in one box out surveying in mid Cornwall last week!
On a more serious note, this year we’ve been working with an exciting new footprint tracking method to monitor dormice – and it’s already proving a game-changer for ecological surveys.
Approved by The Mammal Society in the updated 2025 Hazel Dormouse Mitigation Handbook, the new approach to monitoring dormice is:
✅ Time-efficient
✅ Cost-effective
✅ Less disruptive than traditional nest tube surveys
By placing inked cards inside tubes, we can record dormouse footprints – giving us early, reliable evidence of activity and population levels on-site. Importantly, this new method also allows surveys to conclude earlier once dormice are confirmed on-site – shortening survey windows and helping projects move forward more efficiently, without compromising ecological safeguards. On this project we found dormice on our second visit, meaning the survey can be concluded in 2025, rather than needing to continue into summer 2026.
If you’re in the early stages of planning and need expert ecological advice drop us a line. Early evidence makes all the difference, and we can help you design robust surveys that help ease your development on its planning journey .
