A SILVERSMITH was recruited by a national charity to cast 21 perfectly formed hazelnuts – as part of a campaign to save the English dormouse.

John Huddlestone, 57, from Radley, took up silver work at a night class at Abingdon College in 1978.

Thirty years on, he now teaches the craft and has been recruited by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) to cast prizes for a new campaign.

Mr Huddlestone’s one gold-plated – worth £100 – and 20 silver hazelnuts – worth £75 each – will be hidden in woodland across England and Wales as rewards for volunteers who help record the presence of dormice by examining half-chewed nuts on the forest floor.

PTES hopes to recruit thousands of volunteers who will scour the countryside looking for the tiny rodents, made famous for sleeping in teapots in Oxford author Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Lucky nut hunters will be able to keep any of the prized silver hazelnuts they find.

Unlike squirrels, who gobble down hazelnuts haphazardly, dormice nibble a circular hole in the hazelnuts’ shell to get to the kernel. The dormice then discard the empty shell, complete with distinctive tooth mark.

Experts believe if volunteers can record how many scrupulously gnawed shells they find, they will gain a better knowledge of how many dormice still live in the wild.

During the last dormouse survey in 2001, one expert personally examined 50,000 chewed shells to determine which were created by dormice.

Records in Oxfordshire are out of date, leaving naturalists clueless about how many still survive in the wild.

Monitoring at the last known habitat in Oxfordshire ended in 2006 because all traces of the dormice, which measure just seven centi-metres long, had disappeared.

Mr Huddlestone, of St James Road, who also works as a scientist at AEA Technology at Harwell, cast the nuts by pouring silver and gold into clay moulds made around real hazelnuts.

He said: “The appeal is making something beautiful with my own hallmark that will be around for many, many years.

“It was an odd commission, but I had already cast walnuts and nectarine stones. I do all things – from silver belt buckles to delicate earrings.”

Nut hunters, who have until March next year to find the nuts, can register at ptes.org