If you’re going to live, live ardently – and you can’t do that without plenty of sleep. So yes, I spend a great deal of my time asleep. But when I’m awake there’s more intensity in a minute of my life than in a day of anything else that breathes.
Monday
You work it out: my waking minutes are too packed and too precious for such fripperies as abstract thought. But it’s a fact that when humans were indifferent to us they created a perfect world for us. Now they love us – and are busy destroying all that perfection. Where are the woods, the woodland management, the hedges, the lovingly maintained hazel coppices we adore?
Tuesday
I’ve no more time for this today. Too busy. There are those who see the summer as a time of short nights and long days. It seems the exact opposite to me. I snooze away the day and it’s gone in a trice, while the hours of darkness are packed with unending incident. Ah, the blackness of the night-time canopy: a place packed with food and life and hope.
Wednesday
Truth lies in what you can touch: and from my whiskers I know certainty. Only by touch can you understand the world. I have 33 whiskers on each side and I can move each one 25 times a second: forwards and backwards, up and down, or all together for intense focus, scanning the world, sensing the movement of water and air around me.
Thursday
I don’t travel far in the boring linear sense of the term. But I cover immense distances every night: up and down and round and round. The ground is anathema. Every part of me is about life above the ground. I turn my hind feet back-to-front and the trickiest descent becomes easy. The mind of a tree-person is quite different to that of a flatlander. I loved the sweet-tasting blossom of spring; I will love the fat round hazelnuts of autumn; right now it’s mostly caterpillars. And if supplies dwindle I’ll take a snooze until things get better. No sense in squandering energy.
Friday
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They’re gone. I’ll miss them. They were pale grey darlings and I showed them how to make a living in the treetops. They were born pink, blind and hairless in my nest. Their eyes opened, the fur grew and soon I was leading them round the canopy. Next year they’ll be ginger grownups all ready to make more dormice.
Saturday
But before that, the long winter. Late October, one more frenzied night ends and suddenly you find yourself saying, “You know, I really could do with a snooze. A proper one.” Suddenly the ground seems rather attractive. So, full of hazelnuts and twice as heavy as I was in the spring, I scramble down among the roots and leaves, find a cosy spot, curl up into a ball, wrap my tail around my face and the long threat of winter has vanished. Then to be alive in the sweet spring when waking life begins again: ah! The intensity of such a life would overwhelm lesser creatures than us.
Hazel dormouse CV
Lifespan a good five years
Eating habits the arboreal buffet
Hobbies frenzy, slumber
Sexual preferences nice eyes, good whiskers
Photograph by Arterra/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images