The work on the motorway has been described as “essential” by National Highways, with route manager Jonathan Hill saying when it started that they hoped to keep disruption to a minimum.<\/p>\n
“We’ve been forced to pause the drainage scheme after dormice were found on site,” he now says.<\/p>\n
“We’re currently awaiting a licence from Natural England before resolving the environmental issue and resuming the scheme to completion, and in the meantime all traffic management will remain in place.”<\/p>\n
Morris said: “Hazel dormice are a legally protected species under UK and European law, which means that it’s illegal to deliberately or recklessly kill, injure, or capture them, or damage or destroy their habitat.<\/p>\n
“No doubt this will be very frustrating for M5 commuters. I understand this entirely. But unfortunately, it’s just very necessary, to try to stem the worrying declines in our struggling wildlife populations.”<\/p>\n
According to Morris, numbers of dormice in the UK have dropped by 70% in some places in the past 25 years.<\/p>\n
She said the population decline was “unsustainable”, adding: “They are really suffering from habitat loss and fragmentation in particular, as they are largely arboreal which means they don’t really like to come down to the ground.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The work on the motorway has been described as “essential” by National Highways, with route manager Jonathan Hill…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":507380,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-507379","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507379\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}