The adorable snoring dormouse (video)

[Video Link]

Things I did not know before viewing this adorable video shot by Surrey Wildlife Trust Mammal Project Officer Dave Williams:

1) The dormouse, a little rodent species you'll find in Britain, hibernate in the winter in nests they hide on the ground.

2) The dormouse spends up to one-third of its life in hibernation, and typically begin that winter "sleep" when the first frost hits, and their food sources are gone.

3) They lose about a quarter of their body weight during hibernation.

4) The word "dormouse" comes from the Anglo-Norman dormeus, which means "sleepy (one)"

You can donate to support the Surrey Wildlife Trust's nature conservation work here.

(via @joeljohnson, photo: Dave Williams, Surrey Wildlife Trust)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: adorable • animal • animals • awwww • britain • critter • cute • dormice • dormouse • mouse • pets • video

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MrsBug

That’s weapon-grade cute, right there!
Manny

Better than unicorns!
http://noctilucent-studios.blogspot.com/ Noctilucent Studios

Too cute for words!
awjt

Fixed.
julianasbananas

Can I put him in my diorama of the Mad Hatter’s tea party! I wants!!
http://monolithcreative.com thekinginyellow

no room! no room!
http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch

I would’ve immediately thought respiratory illness. I’ve never heard my rats and mice make sounds like this otherwise. But I’m sure the Surrey Wildlife Trust Mammal Project knows what that sounds like.

Also, dorperson: one who sleeps one-third of one’s life away. Oh wait! :D

They really are sleepy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHCPYEgbVe0&feature=related
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Trent-Baker/100000123865597 Trent Baker
  
  Isn’t that true of everybody? I mean the recommended amount of time you sleep is 8 out of 24 hours, now I am hardly a maths genius, but isn’t that a 3rd of the day?
  - knappa
    
    Yes, but I think that the correct statement is that they hibernate 1/3 of their lives, not sleep. Presumably they sleep at least 1/3 of the time the aren’t hibernating. That puts sleep+hibernation at more than 5/9 of their lives or an average of more than 13 hours a day.
Stonewalker

What. I don’t even.

AMAZING!!
irened

“The dormouse, a little rodent species you’ll find in Britain”…

Actually, there are several species of dormice throughout Europe, Asia and Africa. The one most commonly found in Britain is the Hazel dormouse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Dormouse
This is the one the Surrey Dormouse project focuses on. There’s also a small population of another species, the edible dormouse (Glis glis), in central England.
- http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin
  
  Thanks, but if this is suggested as a copy correction (?), it’s unnecessary. I wrote this post well aware that dormouse species exist elsewhere. The fact that “you’ll find [them] in Britain” doesn’t mean you won’t find them in other parts of the world, also.
  - emcomments
    
    God Xeni, this is almost as cute as the dormouse – in a tetchy, you haven’t caught me out, defensive kind of way.
  - SamSam
    
    “Cats, an interesting species you’ll find in Brazil…”
    
    Sounds a bit odd right there. ;)
    - geth
      
      ‘Cats, an interesting species you’ll find in many areas of the world . . . ” sounds just as odd, because it assumes that the audience doesn’t know what a cat is, which is absurd.
- http://twitter.com/writebastard Ian Wood
  
  Edible?
  
  Is it…is it tasty, preciouss?
  - Jonathan Badger
    
    The Romans thought so at least — they didn’t just eat dormice because they were around but went to the trouble of actually *farming* them.
    - jeligula
      
      Coated in honey, as always. Those Romans and their honey-coated non-game animal appetites.
    - Beanolini
      
      The dormouse the Romans farmed and ate was the edible dormouse, which is much bigger, and rather less cute.
irened

Another thing: the Hazel dormouse is indigenous to Britain but is also found on the European continent as far as Turkey and Russia.

/biology nerd
- http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin
  
  this is all very cool, and thanks for sharing. :)
http://twitter.com/Ceri_O Ceri_O

why has it been lifted? Why wasn’t it left in its nest, undisturbed?
jephary

While watching the video, the google ad that floated up asked “Do you suffer from sleep apnea?” Coincidence?
- morcheeba
  
  . . .
- morcheeba
  
  My ad was for a culinary school :-(
- bibulb
  
  I was going to make a crack about fitting the poor thing with a CPAP mask…
  
  Also : ADORABLE.
- fletcher_katherine
  
  My ad was for an anti-snoring mouthpiece!
- SamSam
  
  Hardly… “snoring” is in the video’s very title, and “sleep apnea” is in many of the comments, including the top-rated one. You think Google’s ad algorithms don’t know that?
hughillustration

If you listen carefully, you can hear what he’s saying: “Feed your head!”
sam1148

Soft Dormouse, warm dormouse
Little ball of fur
Happy dormouse, Sleepy Dormouse
Snore, snore, snore.
- marilove
  
  HAHAHA!!!
http://twitter.com/Fornicus Fornicus

More like snoremouse amirite?
edgore

Needs moar teapot
- Donald Petersen
  
  Plus a splash of treacle.
http://twitter.com/golvio golvio

My cat sounded like that when she snored, but only when she had a stuffy nose. I didn’t expect something so little to be so loud!
- jackie31337
  
  That was my reaction the first time I heard my toddler daughter snore.
Hollando

Phenomenal.
I’m flashing hard on A.A. Milne’s “The Dormouse and the Doctor”.
Thank you for sharing this!
JoshP

at sam1148

Is that Burns? It sounds sorta familiar… English rustic. And why has noone called Xeni to task for misuse of loose vs. lose??? Oh, everyone’s brain snogging to the cuteness… mmmm. :)
- exile
  
  Um, Burns didn’t do English rustic.
  But he did do a mouse poem – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Mouse
Mantissa128

Okay, I think we’ve hit a saturation point. May as well redefine “lose” to be spelled “loose” and just be done with it.

“Eye have a spelling chequer,
It came with my Pea Sea.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss Steaks I can knot sea.”
- http://twitter.com/lackriver todd sanders
  
  yeah i’ve given up as well. why people don’t know the difference between lose and loose is beyond me.
- jeligula
  
  Loosing things is one of my pet peeves, but I have found that pedantry is a crucifiable crime here on boingboing. Thank you for bringing it up. Cory, care to try and argue this one? If it can be accomplished without the attempt, I would like to see it. (Sorry, couldn’t resist)
  - http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan
    
    The snag is that pretty much anything you can lose, you can also loose (presumably just a bit more quickly). So the transgressor might always claim that’s what they meant. You know they’re trying to save face, but they might not be, so you can’t call ‘em on it.
ryuthrowsstuff

We had one as a class pet when I was 9. Pretty awesome little critters. Surprisingly friendly and willing to be handled for rodents. They also hang upside down from their tails regularly if I remember correctly. Its pretty groovy.
unicornsfillmewithdread

I just got here. “Loosing weight” makes me think of a Thanksgiving dinner gone horribly wrong.
jimkirk

Remember what the dormouse said,
“Feed your head, feed your head.”
- Sean McCorkle
  
  “You might just as well say ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’” – Lewis Carroll
Gunn

If they just lie around asleep on the ground for four months, how come they’re not all just wolfed down by something larger and wide awake? (Though I do know, @irened, that there aren’t any wild wolves in Britain anymore.)
GavinD

I’m imagining a tiny little CPAP machine.
social_maladroit

The guy holding the dormouse is probably thinking to himself, “Dang it. You never have a mouse trap when you need one.”
http://profile.yahoo.com/ZCL2OPENDC7KJ66WOE3GHRHUWY Nora

so cute!!! I want him….. or her :)
WaylonWillie

Does he snore continuously all winter? Wouldn’t that burn up almost all of his energy?
Jane94

Semi-relevant, and too cool to not share, having been reminded of it: One of the best short stories Kipling ever wrote IMO is ostensibly a children’s tale, framed in a story about a dormouse which is shown to children, like this, but not given to them to keep in a cage because that would be cruel. It is called The Tree of Justice, from Rewards and Fairies. I lack the eloquence to do it justice, but it is only nominally a children’s story. The sort of thing you like as a kid and realize decades later had a whole lot more to it than you first saw. It is wise and educational historical fiction, a pointed comment about human rights and dignity and realpolitik and loyalty and such things, a lively drama of difficult choices and loyalties, an interesting window into what was commonplace in Kipling’s time. I can’t say much more without spoilers, but honestly I think it’s one of his best works, well worth a read, it’s not long. It’s a story that somehow should be a Johnny Cash song. (Don’t miss the transition out of normal reality when Puck shows up, they establish that in earlier stories so it’s easy to miss in this if you read it alone.)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32772/32772-h/32772-h.htm#CHAPTER_The_Tree_of_Justice
Laura S.

I see your adorable snoring dormouse and raise you an adorable snoring hummingbird: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj5huCuhD_Q
SomeGuyNamedMark

Wait until they record the Chesire cat
JhmL

It’s at that point the wake-up alarm always goes off. I hate that part.
jackie31337

My first thought was that the poor little thing must have sleep apnea to be snoring that loud. Do dormice (dormouses?) usually snore like that?

Edit: I see I’m not the only one with sleep apnea on the mind.
TooGoodToCheck

So. . . as a consequence of this thread, I found myself reading the wikipedia page about edible dormice. . .

It was farmed and eaten by the ancient Romans (usually as a snack)

I have never been more aware of my deep appreciation for living in an era where one might simply buy a bag of potato chips.
- http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty
  
  Imperialist titbits
- tyr
  
  Yes I’m so glad our culture has grown so much. One bucket of dismembered chicken parts, please.