00:00 Dormouse populations have dropped by 70% since the year 2000
00:03 and their range has declined by 20 English counties in the last 100 years
00:07 which is why we're here in this woodland in Bedfordshire today
00:10 to reintroduce more Dormouse to the wild and to improve the genetics of the
00:14 local population here that we reintroduced in 2001. The Dormouse
00:18 reintroduction program started in 1993. We have reintroduced Dormouse to 13
00:23 counties and 36 reintroductions at 26 different sites.
00:27 It's very much a partnership program. The Dormouse are bred by
00:30 the Common Dormouse Captive Breeders Group. They're quarantined at the
00:33 Zoological Society of London and also at Painting Zoo as well
00:36 and then of course we work with local landowners to find reintroduction sites
00:39 and also to make sure there's an ongoing continuity of management
00:43 to enable Dormouse to thrive into the future. The history of these woods is
00:47 that they're ancient semi-natural woodlands so
00:50 they've been here for thousands of years and it's got really good habitat for
00:54 Dormice with the tall standard trees and also the most important bit of the
00:59 shrubs underneath the big trees. The volunteers are really important because
01:02 they're our eyes and ears in the forest and they're the people who have been
01:06 doing the monitoring of the Dormouse population
01:08 so the people counting them and they're using the nest boxes
01:11 inspecting them once a month and that gives us a year-on-year comparison of
01:15 how the population is doing and it's thriving in
01:18 the woodland and they're even finding nests outside of the woodland as well.
01:23 The Dormouse come into quarantine with ourselves and Painting Zoo for eight
01:26 weeks prior to their release and during that time we make sure that
01:30 they're not carrying any non-native parasites that could cause
01:33 disease in the wildlife where they're being released
01:35 and we also make sure that they're healthy through regular health checks
01:39 to make sure that they are fit for release, they're going to do well in the
01:42 wild. We want them to be able to find food, we want them to be able to breed
01:46 and survive. After today we're going to come back in
01:48 10 days time and at that point we're going to give them another health check
01:52 to make sure that everything is still looking great
01:54 before we release them into the wild.
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