Snapping through the twigs and criss-crossed brambles, every now and then we get to a small glade. I’m following the survey team, and periodically I have to stop to remove tiny spines from my socks. Among the the trees that I’m particularly interested in are hazels. Hazels typically live about eighty years. Many have been coppiced – a traditional technique of hacking the tree back to its stump in order to generate more offshoots. The more offshoots you have, the more wrist-think trunks will grow and the more wood you can harvest from the same tree. This was technique was used throughout England to generate firewood, thatching rods and wood for fencing. As well as prolonging the tree’s life, coppicing also breaks up the canopy coverage, allowing more light to spill across the woodland floor, giving plants a chance to flourish there. From a distance hazel looks almost like an exotic bamboo with its thin, straight tentacle-like trunks and thousands of rounded leaves. Close up, each leaf is extraordinarily soft, almost like lambs wool and you can see why a creature would want to use it for nesting.

Among the trunks, at chest height, a thin strip of white wire keeps a small wooden box tethered to the tree. I looks like an out of place roadside telephone, or something from a Hardy Boys adventure. Each box has a number written on it in thick boardmarker. These numbers correspond to those on our survey map, only adding to the sense of this being a treasure hunt for something very special indeed.

Approaching the box quietly, you can use a ‘bung’ - usually a plastic bag from the Co-Op - and use it to close off the entry hole at the back of the box. Turning a small hook on the front, you push the roof aside for peak inside, or if nobody’s home, this can be lifted away completely for a better view. Most of the time there are few dried leaves and little else.

Boxes have been placed in rows, twenty metres apart from one another, often surrounded by dense leaf-fall, a flash of bluebells and sawn hazel trunks stacked from earlier in the season. You can stand and close your eyes, and hear the chitter of birds and the misty rain whish of a light breeze skiffling through the branches. For a Londoner like me, living under Heathrow airspace, and hearing the local street preacher compete with ambulance sirens outside Specsavers, it feels exceptionally peaceful. There’s a kind of fairy tale beauty to these woods which is easy to succumb to, pushing away thick twists of brush and imagining the blind prince in Rapunzel scrambling through the thorns for his lost love, even though the spell is quickly broken when you slip in two inches of marshy mud, or you hear the chitter-chutter of the local steam train.

The nest boxes we’ve come to look at have been put here by The People’s Trust for Endangered Species. There are about five hundred boxes in this wood, and they’re designed to attract a once-common sight: the hazel dormouse. The unusual spelling of the word ‘dormouse’ shares its origin with the French dormir, from the Latin, dormire, ‘to sleep’. Dormice are famous for being found fast asleep, hibernating for up to six months, and in states of torpor even on summer days, reducing their heart rates to conserve energy for an evening’s outing.

Each adult dormouse weighs around 15-25g (about the same as five sugar cubes) and they have sandy, ginger fur and rose-petal pink paws. When in torpor, the dormouse will tuck itself into a ball, eyes squeezed closed, with a fine bushy tail wound over its head. For an animal with such a reputation for sleeping on the job, you would have thought they would make for terrible builders, but their tooth and paw spun whorls of hazel leaves honeysuckle bark are brilliantly neat. Females are better builders than males, who are sometimes found trying to get a good afternoon’s kip under a two twigs and a leaf over the face – probably one found just by the back door. Where we find an occupied box, this must be placed into a special nest box bag. Here any would-be escapees can be captured, checked (Are they male or female? Are they in good health?), weighed and returned safely home.

Dormice used to be abundant in England. The Elizabethans used their body fat as a remedy for insomnia, and the Victorians, admiring their natural reticence to bite, kept dormice as pets. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, rest their elbows on the back of a sleeping dormouse as it snoozes.

‘Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,’ thought Alice; ‘only, as it's asleep, I suppose it doesn't mind.’

With the encouragement of a couple of pinches from the Hatter, the Dormouse tells a somniloquent story about three girls who “lived on treacle... and they’re names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie” and that were based on the real life Alice Liddell and her sisters.

‘They were learning to draw,’ the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbingits eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; ‘and they drew all manner of things– everything that begins with an M… mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness--you know you say things are "much of a muchness"--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?’

Dormice live predominantly above the forest floor in the branches, barely, if ever touching the ground. Their nests are neatly made whorls of hazel leaves and twigs, and they live off pollen and honeysuckle, berries and small insects. They’ve gone from being a household pet of the Victorians to being on the verge of extinction. In the last 25 years dormice have seen a 70% decline. They are so rare that a special licence is required to handle them.

The decline in dormice is due to the three big killers: a warmer climate, habitat destruction and ‘fragmentation’ the splitting up of the dormouse’s back garden with roads, walls, apartment blocks or railway lines. Cutting down hedgerows and disturbing populations of dormice, with construction and poor forest management can bring dangers of their own, as can a change in climate. Dormice now come out of hibernation thirty eight days earlier than used to be the case, when food is scarce, and competition with other woodland-dwelling animals, stiff. This has driven dormice further afield in search of food into back gardens and fields where they face predation from most of the cast of The Animals of Farthing Wood including, owls, squirrels, weasels, badgers, stoats and domestic cats. Recently a group were found in a plant pot bought at a local garden centre. The dormouse, with its cutesy black eyes and harmless tea towel image, is a poster child for the less photogenic animals and plants, the seaweeds and the mosses, the river lampreys, the mayflies and the snails that are also in decline.

Unless there is a predictable, measurable, short term economic gain to the conservation of species and habitats, then policies are unlikely to be made to protect them. We have become so ill-attuned to our surroundings that saving a river isn’t newsworthy. This is part of a broader problem with all declining species throughout the British Isles – we humans need more housing, we need more infrastructure, we need more food and water, so the byword is ‘mitigation’ not ‘protection’. Hearing about the £7,000 spent by Hampshire Council on building a bridge for dormice and lizards, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne said, “These are the ridiculous things that get in the way of growth.” Efforts like this are remarkably good value, considering that several million pounds are spent by developers each year for the protection of other species including the Great Crested Newt which has also experienced a steep decline. Back on the Isle of Wight, throughout our survey, most of the boxes we visited were either empty or were occupied by families of blue tits. Every year abandoned boxes are cleared out to make way for new generations to move in.

There are dormice surveys throughout the UK and clips like the one below, from a survey in Surrey, have been shared widely around the internet.

Despite the decline in numbers reintroductions have been successfully carried out in Derbyshire, Cambridgeshire and Buckinghamshire, by groups including PTES, local Wildlife Trusts and Natural England. Among these reintroductions were dormice that had been displaced by the construction work on the Channel Tunnel. If you want to know more about dormice, get involved in the national dormice monitoring programme, then visit the PTES website.