• Red squirrels
AN APPRECIATION OF THE RED SQUIRREL
Was it one? A flash of russet, the rattle of needles, the feeling of being watched. The red squirrel is the forest’s equivalent of a shooting star, streaking across your side gaze, gone before you know what you’ve missed. When I moved to Cumbria’s Eden Valley 12 years ago, I saw them often. They stole into our garden to steal nuts from the bird table and scampered, when I was lucky, across the footpath through the wood where I walked daily with my toddler and dog. As a city girl finally living the rural dream after many years in London’s grasp, to me they symbolised everything that felt precious about my new home.
Another baby, another dog, a bigger house. One day I realised I didn’t see as many reds as I used to. Greys were there instead, bigger, less well camouflaged, easier to spot on the fringes of woodlands, even from the car window. Shy, beautiful natives versus greedy American aggressors. The symbolism is clumsy, but perhaps it’s one reason why we hold these auburn underdogs so closely to our hearts.
Red squirrels weren’t always so innocent: Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin was a rude rodent, goading Old Brown the owl with riddles. Fifty years on, Tufty Fluffy tail turned things around. The mascot of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) taught generations of children safely to cross the road. As a former Tufty Club member, I will never see red squirrels as anything other than upstanding leaders of the woodland community.
I live in the Lake District now. My children cross the road to school minutes from the shore where Potter envisioned Nutkin setting sail towards Owl Island on his twiggy raft. But we rarely spot red rascals in the local woods. During the past 150 years, red squirrel numbers have declined from the millions to the thousands: just 140,000 are thought to remain in the UK, three-quarters of them in Scotland. It’s feared the species, although not endangered in continental Europe, could disappear in England during the next ten years.
Those American invaders are indeed to blame, although habitat loss played a part. Since the Victorians introduced them as ‘ornaments’ to country estates, grey squirrels have outcompeted reds for food. In the margins of Northern England, Anglesey and Dorset, where reds have retreated, the fightback is passionate and controversial. Volunteers, many trained to cull, have been recruited in Europe’s largest programme of invasive species elimination.
In strongholds such as Smardale Gill in Cumbria, Kielder Forest in Northumberland and Brownsea Island in Dorset, autumn is the best time to see them. Thinning tree canopies make them easier to spot as they forage for nuts and acorns. Red squirrels don’t hibernate, but they do hunker down in cold weather. A bushy tail makes an excellent sail, as Beatrix Potter knew well, but it makes a lovely blanket, too.