It starts with scratching noises, followed by a series of bumps in the night. Or, in my mum’s words: “As soon as we go to bed and turn out the light, we hear it. It gets worse and worse. They are really noisy. We thought we had squirrels in the loft.”
My parents are just the latest victims of the tiny but terrible scourge of the home counties: the edible dormouse, also known by its taxonomic name, Glis glis. And they are not alone: in more rural and affluent parts of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, homeowners are being plagued by hordes of the sharp-toothed destroyers, whose population is burgeoning. As well as being noisy, edible dormice chew through wiring and woodwork, leave droppings behind, strip fruit trees and occasionally drown in water tanks.
It all started in 1902, when Lord Rothschild introduced the European rodents, which look a bit like a grey squirrel, but with a thinner tail, on his estate in Tring, Hertfordshire. It only took a few to escape, and now the creatures are typically found within roughly a 20-mile radius, taking in Beaconsfield, Chequers, the PM’s country retreat near Aylesbury, and Luton.
The last official estimate, in 1995, put the population at 10,000, but the People’s Trust for Endangered Species believes it could have grown to 30,000, with Glis glis producing litters as large as nine, and sightings recorded as far away as Somerset and Dundee. Yet the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has no plans to control the population.
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For my parents, who live in the Chilterns, the siege started three years ago. My mother, Linda Emery, a nurse, says: “One lady down our road had 40 last year. She woke up one morning and there was one on her bed. Luckily, ours have never got out of the loft and into the house.”
Pearces Hardware shop, in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, has seen huge demand for its Glis glis traps, which sell for £18.50. One of the staff told me: “You have to capture them live — but I don’t ask customers what happens next.”
The species is not endangered or protected, but it is an offence to catch them and release them into the wild, and homeowners are not allowed to kill them without a licence, available free from Natural England. The mice were originally fattened on chestnuts and acorns and eaten by the Romans as a delicacy (hence the “edible” name) — but it is hard to imagine modern homeowners killing, cooking and snacking on them.