Squirrels are unkown in Morvern
I NOTED a report in The Oban Times of March 22, 2018, that Trees for Life plan to ‘help red squirrels return to Morvern’.
Interesting, as there are no records of squirrels having been in the parish before. There must have been a very good reason as they used to be found across Loch Sunart in nearby Ardnamurchan.
The only reference I have for squirrels in Morvern is a negative one. It appears in a letter dated March 4, 1889, from Walter Elliott, the manager of Ardtornish estate (18521906), in reply to a well-known Scottish naturalist, in which he writes that squirrels had never been seen at Ardtornish, as far as he could learn.
Given the number of gamekeepers and stalkers in Morvern at the time and their knowledge and interest in the natural history world, I don’t doubt the veracity of his statement.
I suggest their absence was due, in part, to Morvern’s high rainfall and because the peninsula lies at the southern limit of the old Caledonian forest whose native Scots pine, mature oak and other trees, were favoured by these animals.
The Gaelic word for a squirrel is Feorag, and occurs in no fewer than five place names in Argyll. One of these, Innis nam Fheorag, is near Glenborrodale in Ardnamurchan.
Further proof of their presence in that part of the world can be found in a Gaelic dictionary compiled in 1741 by Alexander MacDonald (c1695-c1770), better known as Mac Mhaighstear Alasdair, the most famous of the 18th-century Gaelic poets who is buried on St Finan’s Isle on Loch Shiel. And again in his masterpiece, The Birlinn of Clanranald, which describes the epic voyage of a galley from South Uist to Northern Ireland.
Six men were chosen as a reserve in case any of the original crew should fail or be swept overboard, so that one of these could take his place.
One of the verses reads: ‘Let six rise now, quick and ready, handy and lively; who will go and come and leap up and down her, like a hare on the mountain top, dogs pursuing; who can climb the tight, hard shrouds of slender hemp, nimble as the May-time squirrel up a tree trunk.’
Naturalist historians are divided as to when squirrels arrived in Scotland and their subsequent migration to the Highlands. There is a reference to them inhabiting Sutherland in 1630 but little detail survives.
Duncan Ban MacIntyre, another brilliant Gaelic bard who lived in Glenorchy, wrote a satirical poem about a tailor who had offended him and in which he speaks of squirrels as if he was familiar with them. His poem was composed between 1760 and 1780 - long before he died in 1812.
If we turn to the Statistical Accounts of Scotland, we are on firmer ground. The first was published between 1791 and 1799; the second came out between 1834 and 1845 under the auspices of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; and the third, between 1951 and 1992.
The first two are considered to be among the finest European contemporary records of life in Scotland during the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Parish by parish throughout Scotland, ministers provided a rich record of a wide variety of topics, including climate, agriculture, fishing and wildlife; population, schools; antiquities, geology, place names and local history.
The second and third followed a similar pattern but this time the contributors included doctors, schoolmasters and local historians on the assumption that they were likely to be meticulous and enlightened scholars with a good command of the English language which was thought essential in the more remote Highland and Island parishes where Gaelic was still in everyday use.
From these sources, we know indigenous squirrels started to disappear from Argyll between 1839 and 1842. Either they survived in small pockets and went unnoticed in remote places, or they were brought in from the Lowlands as I have a note of them being reintroduced to Argyll at Minard.
They reached Inveraray in 1853 or 1855 and by 1865 were seen north of the River Orchy. In the same year one was spotted at Portinnisherich on the east side of Loch Awe; and by 1879 at Glenmore, near Kilmelfort.
In Cowal, in 1881, they were confined to the east shore of Loch Fyne, from Ardkinglas to the woods of Balliemore.
In 1890, the 10th Duke of Argyll recorded: ‘Squirrels were unknown in my younger days. I have no idea how they came, but they have been established at least 20 years, and became so numerous as nearly to ruin my fine silver firs, on which alone, I think they are most destructive. I have now shot them down to a small number, and the “silvers” are already recovering.’
Donald Cameron of Lochiel (1832-1919) believed squirrels to have been introduced into Lochaber through the Countess of Seafield, who took two or three pairs to Glen Urquhart from where they spread down Loch Ness to Invergarry and were first seen at Achnacarry about 1885.
Returning to the appeal by Trees for Life to put red squirrels into Morvern, call me cynical, but I suspect that, somewhere in the background, there is a government grant lurking.
I like squirrels and I don’t disapprove of grants if they genuinely help local people to get a leg-up in life. I used to be a director of Highland Opportunities Ltd, which enabled smalland medium-sized enterprises to create and sustain employment in the Highlands. It was, and still is, a great success.
Unlike the hefty government grants which are handed out willy-nilly to some of the wealthiest people in the country to plant thousands of acres of ghastly Sitka spruce and eradicate rhododendrons that have spread from their own gardens, instead of oak and other native species.
I am not a fan of the catchphrase: ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer’, which Karl Marx called the Law of Increasing Poverty, but I cannot help thinking that, when money is tight, every applicant should be means-tested.
Other eye-watering sums are being doled out to small community-groups who aspire to be Highland lairds. The latest, from the public purse, is the first dollop (£4.5 million) with more likely to follow, going to a minority group on Mull to buy the island of Ulva purely for political reasons. When public services and the NHS are in meltdown, this is hardly the time for such largesse.
As much as I would prefer to meet a squirrel in Morvern’s White Glen than a lynx or a wolf, I cannot see them surviving. If they don’t perish in the rain and snow, pine martens and wild cats – a species already receiving financial assistance from Holyrood – will soon make short work of them.
If Trees for Life is serious about the future of woodlands in the Highlands, it must start lobbying the Scottish Government to take all grants away from quick growing timber in favour of hard woods.