Mini rope bridges built in Forest of Dean to help dormice | Hacker News Reader

Mini rope bridges built in Forest of Dean to help dormice

bbc.com

101 pointsdefrost32 comments

We are losing a lot of trees in the UK. There are the headline diseases - Ash die-back is just one. On top of that we have had some stressfully hot summers recently and extended wet periods in other seasons. Throw in some strong winds and you get trees snapping or simply being uprooted - rotting roots in soft earth.

I live next door to a park with a lot of trees in it and there is a lot of "survival of the fittest" going on. Its not all bad because the park was partly overrun with some quite anti social non-natives (we call them laurels - they are from South America, can't remember the formal name). The laurels caused spindly growth - thin trunks, few branches in species that could escape vertically. Also there was a density problem which is being sorted out gradually.

Sadly a 700+ year old oak keeled over recently. It was responding really well to a major trim done five or so years ago but it turns out that our current weather is worse than a mini ice age.

Dormice are/were an iconic rodent in the UK that nearly no one has ever seen these days. My mum (so think 1940-60s, Devon farm girl) recalled seeing them everywhere. She also recalled beaches covered in mackerel fish in the morning after a night with a full moon or something similar. You don't see that now that the seas are fished out. However, I recently visited Chesil beach in Dorset and there were loads of cuttlefish bones on the beach. Hopefully that means there are loads of cuttlefish living and dying out at sea and I'll tentatively take that as a positive sign.

Do dormice need rope bridges? I think it does help to patch over a particular situation, quickly and quite cheaply but its not exactly a panacea for the real woes of the world.

Dormice are possibly the cutest rodent ever - call me out and submit your favourite rodent!

Rodentia have a single pair of continuously growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws.

Thylacomyidae are a 'pouched mouse' in bad Greek ... however Bilbies are pretty damn cute.

https://www.google.com/search?as_st=y&as_epq=bilby&cr=countr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrotis

Bilby monitoring: https://youtu.be/J7h9V4aKlJw?t=251

and I strongly recommend the Easter Bilby to all: https://www.savethebilbyfund.org.au/bilbies-not-bunnies-at-e...

TIL the "Bob Bilby" stuffy from Bluey is based on a real animal.

Wait until you find out the Tasmanian Devil is real and existed on the mainland outside of Tasmania all the way across the country (the size of mainland USofA) in W.Australia .. and we almost didn't know thanks to some idiot C-suites in a mining company that blasted where they really should not have.

https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/tasman...

> its not exactly a panacea for the real woes of the world.

It specifically may not be, but "when it doesn't cost you much, do something to improve the lives of those who are very unlikely to ever do anything for you in return" could indeed help the real woes of the world if such a general attitude were more widespread.

EDIT: shout out to Marmota marmota

Langiappe: "mousie 'pik'" (1978) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0I3YgFLSy8

May you discover the secret to self-winding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcPLsIy4tys http://www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/mouse.html

There are a lot of candidates to cutest rodent ever, specially in the squirrel or bunny departments

To pick up something less common, I will say Pacarana, for example. A living relative to the largest ever known rodent (an extinct cow-sized pliocene species).

Right across the canal, in The Netherlands it's just as bad. I had to chop down thirty threes in the last two years that had stood for decades or more. Ash and oak (waterlogged, fungi), willow, chestnut and walnut (drought).

But aside from trees, our current plant situation is especially bad due to excessive nitrogen deposit. Some species (nettle, bramble) are doing well, being nitrogen lovers, but they push out anything that isn't fond of extreme levels of nitrogen.

Nitrogen overload is a hot topic here, because it's not only is it clearly man made climate change, it acts on a local geography. So everyone is "fighting": do we want less houses built, less nature, or less farmers.

At least with the trees being in shock, it's not directly a local "fault". Governments cannot order laws for more or less rain (wel...) but they easily could for more or less nitrogen.

Edit: oh, and my cats occasionally bring in a Rosse Woelmuis. They are my local favorite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_vole?wprov=sfla1

> So everyone is "fighting": do we want less houses built, less nature, or less farmers.

What stance do the "Partij voor de Dieren" (animals' party) take?

(and is this what would count as "fighting" by US standards, or is it more along the lines of "we'll all write passive-aggressive rhyming couplets about each other's misbehaviours come christmastime"?)

They (Disclaimer: like me) are for a massive reduction in farming. In the Netherlands, we produce insane amounts of beef, milk, and pork. There's far more pigs than humans in The Netherlands. Most produce is exported. But the "shit" (literally too) remains. The proteins to produce all that meat is imported.

Reducing that to 50% will still be enough for net export, but solve the nitrogen crisis within years. It will, however, cause several thousands of farmers to have to stop or move to another business model (e.g. organic farming). Something they violently refuse to even consider.

And fighting: no. Literally. Farmers beat up people, block roads, drive over police corridors with tractors, have rammed through the doors of a local parliament with tractors.

It's exceptionally violent and nasty. All triggered by law suits in which individuals and orgs forced the governments to actually start upholding their own laws wrt nitrogen deposits. It the quickly spiralled into actual violence, blockades, and grim protests.

Wat is er gebeurd? Maar dat is niet normaal!

As an anglophone, I'd say the farmers (for people who are at least metaphorically your neighbours) are acting rather ... boorish.

(this explains the anti-immigration platforms: the farmers, deep in their hearts, know that if they keep on carrying on like this some dark-skinned individual will stuff them in a sack and take them by the slow boat to Spain)

Sambucus would love this conditions

But the main problem with some nitrogenated substances in soil is the suspicion that they trigger colon cancer

It does. But like nettle and bramble, it's pushing out other species.

Bramble, nettle, elderflowers (sambucus) are marvelous and valuable plants. And they have important roles in an ecosystem.

It's just that the extreme nitrogen deposits have severely upset the balance. Maybe it'll settle on another level: nature commonly does that. And we'll then have to live with some species gone. I'm not yet ready to just accept that. Given how easy, technically, it is to prevent and turn it back around.

To put some perspective: the Netherlands emits over four times as much NOX/km2 as the European average. With areas going over 10x the average. That is five times what was deposited around 1900. If you look at some maps with nox deposit, the outlines of the Netherlands are clearly visible: https://nos.nl/collectie/13901/artikel/2436073-het-stikstofp...

"Rosse Woelmuis" sounds lovely (I think I can pronounce it properly).

My grandad used to call bats: "flitter mice" which surely goes back many centuries. He was a farmer in Devon and things move quite slowly down (t)here.

German famously has der fledermaus (opera and creature) and vleermuis is the Dutch for bat. In the Germanic languages you can swap out v and f, d and g and y and get pretty similar words. Maus and muis and mouse are pretty obvious too.

No idea why we use bat in modern English - we are obviously the odd one out in the Germanic languages here and yet clearly we did used to use a similar word/description to NL and DE:

Flitter mouse - vleermuis - fledermaus - bat (wtf!)

I think that vleer (NL) means furry and fleder (DE) means ...something... and I know that flitter (EN) means to move erratically and fast. When I try to get Google translate to translate fleder it spits out bat and it also spits out bat for fledermaus.

I doubt that German is broken. What does fleder (DE) mean? and how does it relate to fledermaus?

Vleer comes from Vlerk, which means wings. So it's a quite literal name: winged mouse.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/octopus-and-squid...

Fish are out, cuttlefish are in.

I completely forgot about them before this moment but can definitely remember hearing about them in stories and things as a child. I actually thought it was "door mouse" until now.

My rat is none too happy about that last comment and would like a word with you: https://s.h4x.club/2Nu8d4eW

I have a very strong negative reaction to "cute", but dormice are simply irresistible.

> However, I recently visited Chesil beach in Dorset and there were loads of cuttlefish bones on the beach. Hopefully that means there are loads of cuttlefish living and dying out at sea and I'll tentatively take that as a positive sign.

I routinely walk along the beach at Hengistbury Head (approx 40 miles further east) and have seen cuttlefish bones there for several years running. So perhaps, yes, there is a healthy population off the coast here.

[Edit] Went down a rabbit hole and found [0]. In summary, in the UK, cuttlefish are classified as shellfish in terms of reporting fisheries catches. Catches of shellfish have increased in absolute terms over the last 80 years, from 32k tonnes to 116k tonnes in 2022, and relative to catches of other fish. This is partly due to diversification of the fishing industry, partly because there may be fewer restrictions on shellfish catches.

The Channel is one of the UK hotspots for shellfish catching.

The Marine Conservation Society [1] states that "There is not enough data about cuttlefish in the English channel, but there are indications that populations are too small and fishing pressure is too high. There are no appropriate management measures for this species, despite high landings and high market value. Most cuttlefish are caught by beam trawling in the English Channel. This has the potential to cause damage to the seabed. Trawls can also have high bycatch, potentially of vulnerable species."

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-sea-fisheries-an...

[1] https://www.mcsuk.org/goodfishguide/ratings/wild-capture/905...

Conversly, my observations from Cornwall have been the opposite. I haven't seen cuttlefish bones in the numbers I would expect over the last few years. And the ones I have seen have been tiny. That is until this last weekend, when there were a great deal washed up and of a fair size, I too was joyed by this sight drawing the same conclusions as you did, that it was a good sign.

> the ones I have seen have been tiny

I may help here. As expected, the big ones are from adults in the cuttlefish fished commercially: Sepia officinalis in Europe. Around 1-2Kg or so.

But the tiny bones are (most probably) also from adult cuttlefishes. There are several species of cuttlefishes in Europe. Like Sepia elegans that is locally frequent in the Mediterranean or Atlantic but only grows 8 cm in mantle.

What you have seen is just a reflect of different phases on the ecosystem, the seasons, or the fishing techniques. After reproductive season or big storms a number of cuttlefish bones will strand all at the same time when the animals will die in mass.

Prior art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutty_Narrows_Bridge

As the article says, nothing can replace loss of habitat but everything we can do to help is worth trying and assessing for impact.

There are lots of these at a larger scale across Australia.

I feel like a tree provides much more protection for transit than a rope bridge. I wonder if they’ll avoid the bridge after a bunch are eaten by birds. They need cover.

There are a lot of creatures who cannot cross a road. Everything from slugs, soil bacteria, to various plants who only propagate by roots.

I do wonder how many of those creatures we have already wiped out, or have already doomed by slicing their populations up so small there is insufficient genetic diversity.

How did these species cross natural gaps in terrain in the first place (ie rivers, valleys, ridges, fire damaged forests / grasslands, boulders, etc)?

Many natural barriers one can walk around the end of.

And other natural barriers might only be temporary (eg. rivers move, fire damaged areas regrow).

But some natural barriers (eg. the ocean) are pretty impenetrable, and those have really shaped evolution (eg. kangaroos in australia).

These rope bridges would seem to make easy pickings for raptors looking for an easy snack.

> The rope bridges will help dormice move between trees and stay protected from predators

Mice are snacks. A great many species rely on mice as a primary food source.

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