Garden dormouse
Eliomys quercinus
— Where the name comes from
Eliomys comes from eleiós, the name the Greeks gave the dormouse, plus mŷs. Quercinus, “of the oaks”, names the wood where it was most often found. In Italian it is also called the oak mouse, and the black mask that runs across its eyes to its ears makes it the most recognisable of our dormice.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Rodents
- Habitat
- Broadleaf woodland, orchards, dry-stone walls, mountain huts and barns
- Range
- Western and southern Europe; contracting sharply in the north and east
- Size
- 10–17 cm of body, tail 9–12 cm, 45–120 g
- Diet
- Insects, fruit, seeds, eggs, small vertebrates
- Lifespan
- 5 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the most carnivorous of the dormice: it eats beetles, lizards and nestlings.
- 02
The tail ends in a black and white brush it can shed if seized.
- 03
It hibernates from October to April, often inside mountain houses.
— What sets it apart
It has lost more than half its European range in fifty years and nobody knows exactly why. It has vanished from Lithuania, from Finland, from large parts of Germany and eastern Poland while remaining common in the Iberian peninsula; the hypotheses run from changes in forest management to warmer winters, which shorten hibernation and burn fat reserves. It is the most embarrassing case in European mammalogy: a species disappearing visibly on a continent full of researchers, with no demonstrated cause.
