Tiny Footprints, Big Hope: Dormice at Pentre Ifan

First published as Paw discovery shows a creature is stirring in our November/December 2025 edition, this story begins with marks so small they might easily have been missed: distinctive dormouse footprints, no larger than tiny slices of pizza, left on inked cards in a North Pembrokeshire woodland.

The monitoring project took place at Pentre Ifan, where Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority has been restoring woodland habitat. Volunteers trained through the Cysylltu Natur 25×25 project placed specially designed footprint tunnels among the trees to look for evidence of the native hazel dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius.

The method, developed with guidance from the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, is deliberately non-invasive. A dormouse passing through a plastic tunnel crosses a harmless ink pad and leaves its prints on a recording surface, allowing surveyors to establish that the animal is present without handling or disturbing it.

The tunnels were installed in July 2025 after earlier nest-box checks had found only limited evidence near the eastern edge of the reserve. Through summer and early autumn, volunteers found dormouse footprints in more than half of them, with signs that the animals were becoming more active and ranging more widely as the season progressed.

How the footprints were found

A female dormouse was then found in a nearby nest box in October 2025. Together, the prints and the nest-box record provided some of the clearest evidence yet of a resident population at Pentre Ifan and gave conservationists a better picture of how the animals were using the restored woodland.

Hazel dormice are legally protected and listed as Vulnerable on the Mammal Society’s Red List for Britain. Their national decline makes local evidence particularly important, while the Pentre Ifan results show why long-term woodland restoration and careful monitoring matter.

Early November is an especially fitting time to revisit the story. The People’s Trust for Endangered Species says dormice can continue increasing their weight through October and November before hibernating on the ground beneath leaf litter, log piles or tree stumps. The same autumn landscape that revealed their footprints is also the place where they prepare to survive winter.

Preparing for winter

The original Cysylltu Natur 25×25 project has now ended, but the work has not simply stopped. In February 2026, the National Park Authority said dormouse monitoring and habitat restoration would continue through the next phase of its nature-recovery work, NNF4 Cysylltiadau Naturiol / Naturally Connected.

That continuing commitment gives this archive feature lasting relevance. A set of almost invisible tracks became evidence of a species surviving in one of West Wales’s restored woodlands—and a reminder that patient conservation can reveal wildlife long before most visitors ever see it.

This Flashback Friday feature is republished from West Wales Life & Style, November/December 2025, pages 30–31. It has been edited for the web, with the project’s continuation and seasonal dormouse ecology checked against current information from Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species in November 2026.