Dormouse Requests Extension on Hibernation, Says Six Months Was Not Enough

At the foot of a hazel hedge, under a quilt of last year's leaves, there is a nest about the size of a tennis ball, woven from grass and strips of honeysuckle bark. Inside it, curled so tightly that his tail lies over his nose, is a hazel dormouse the colour of toast. He went to bed in October. On Tuesday morning, at the end of April, a blackbird began to sing directly above him, and he woke up in a very poor mood.

By lunchtime he had issued a statement. Speaking through a gap in the moss, and without opening his eyes, the dormouse said he wished to request an extension of three weeks in order to finish properly. Six months, he explained, had sounded generous when he agreed to it. In practice the first month went on getting comfortable and the last one was ruined by birds, which left him barely four months of real sleep.

The hedge was not sympathetic. A wren who had been up since February pointed out that the hazel was in leaf, the honeysuckle was about to flower and everybody else had managed. The dormouse replied that nobody had consulted him about the wren's timetable and he did not see why she should be consulted about his. A bank vole, asked to mediate, said only that he had been awake all winter and that nobody had offered him an extension of anything.

The request itself is thorough. For three weeks the nest is to be considered closed. There is to be no singing within two metres of it before noon. Any hazelnuts found in the meantime are to be set aside in his name. In return, the dormouse promises to be twice as lively in June. The hedge has heard this before. Last June, witnesses say, he was found asleep on a branch at four in the afternoon with a half-eaten flower still in his paws.

By evening the matter had been settled in the usual way. The night turned cold, the blackbird went quiet, and the dormouse, without waiting for a ruling, tucked his tail back over his nose and granted the extension himself. The wren has lodged an objection. It will be heard when he wakes up, which is to say at his convenience.

The real idea behind it

Hazel dormice really are among the great sleepers of the countryside. They hibernate through the cold months in a tightly woven nest at ground level, typically from around October until April or May, so in a long winter a dormouse can spend more than half the year asleep. Its body cools almost to the temperature of the ground around it, and its heartbeat and breathing slow right down, which is how the fat it puts on in autumn lasts until spring.

The joke about June is real too. Even after waking, a dormouse that meets a cold or hungry spell can drop into a short, shallow sleep called torpor to save energy, sometimes for a few hours in the middle of the day. Its English name is usually linked to the same root as the French word dormir, to sleep. And anyone who has ever bargained with an alarm clock will recognise the argument, because the trouble with a good sleep has always been the same: the morning arrives just when it was getting good.