Distribution
The edible dormouse is found throughout much of western Europe, although it is absent from Portugal, Scandinavia, and most of Spain and the British Isles, as well as from the North Sea coasts of France, Germany, and the Low Countries. It is rather more sparsely distributed through central Europe and the Balkans, but can be found as far north-east as the upper Volga River. It is also found on a number of Mediterranean and Baltic islands, including Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and Crete. Beyond Europe, it is found in scattered populations throughout northern Anatolia, the Caucasus region, and along the southern coast of the Caspian Sea.
It was accidentally introduced to the town of Tring in England through an escape from Lionel Walter Rothschild's private collection in 1902. As a result, the British edible dormouse population, now 10,000 strong, is concentrated in a 200-square-mile (520 km2) triangle between Beaconsfield, Aylesbury and Luton.
Though this animal is regarded as a pest by some, in the United Kingdom the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 prohibits certain methods of killing and taking it, and removing them may require a licence.
Read more about this topic: Edible Dormouse
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“My topic for Army reunions ... this summer: How to prepare for war in time of peace. Not by fortifications, by navies, or by standing armies. But by policies which will add to the happiness and the comfort of all our people and which will tend to the distribution of intelligence [and] wealth equally among all. Our strength is a contented and intelligent community.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)