How Tufty turned the tide against the grey aliens
It IS one of Britain’s best-loved wild animals, warmly characterised by Beatrix Potter and immortalised, at least for my generation, in the ‘tufty Club’ – the eponymous hero of a long-running safety campaign for children by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.
But sciurus vulgaris, the red squirrel, has long been endangered in Britain, driven back to a few forested redoubts – and, it being elusive to boot, you have probably never seen one.
It is the most dainty of creatures, with a russet coat, creamy tummy and distinctive, endearing tufted ears. Of the 140,000 red squirrels estimated today in Britain, 120,000 live in Scotland. In England it survives only in such pockets as Cumbria, Northumberland and, more vigorously, the Isle of Wight.
Yet the tide may be on the turn. Last week, the Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrels campaign carolled that, for the first time, an intense 2017 survey showed a marked increase of the critters in North East Scotland – long the red squirrel’s stronghold – and that populations elsewhere had stabilised.
Even better, red squirrels are starting to colonise places where decades ago they disappeared.
‘In the central Lowlands,’ enthused conservation officer Mary-Anne Collis, ‘red squirrels are holding their ground and as a result we’ve started to see them in areas where they haven’t been seen for a long time.
‘this is particularly noticeable to the south and east of Loch Lomond and the trossachs National Park, which is now predominantly a redonly zone.’
But it is not all good news, warns project manager Dr Mel tonkin. the red squirrel population continues to decline in the Borders and is now menaced, too, in Dumfries and Galloway. ‘It is vital that the work we do here is stepped up to make sure these red squirrel populations remain healthy.’
RED squirrels have an important fan. Prince Charles, patron of the Red Squirrel Survival trust, remembers them at Sandringham and loves those thriving at Balmoral. ‘My great ambition is to have one in the house,’ he once purred. ‘Sitting on the breakfast table and on my shoulder...’
Everyone knows, of course, what happened to drive a wild animal once as widespread in the UK as the blackbird to the margins of the realm – a blunder by well-meaning Victorians who were the first generation really to love nature but whose understanding of ecosystems and the balance therein was woeful.
In around 1876, landed gentry in England shipped in grey squirrels from North America and released them for amusing ornamental interest on their policies.
Grey squirrels grew popular, for they are much less shy than the native animal and will gambol, unconcernedly, even amid crowds of people and in public parks.
But in the 1920s, countryfolk started uneasily to notice that, wherever grey squirrels established themselves, their red cousins quickly disappeared.
As this became undeniable, in 1931 it became illegal (and still is) to release a grey squirrel into the wild. the first of many campaigns to eradicate the interlopers was launched before the Second World War.
For many years the Ministry of Agriculture supplied free shotgun cartridges for the purpose. In one 1950s endeavour, you could get a shilling at any police station for handing in a grey squirrel’s brush. In the 1970s, the Forestry Commission tried to slay large numbers with warfarin, the innovative (if, today, useless) rat poison of that era.
the grey squirrel is not despised solely because of its impact on the red, but because they do dreadful, bark-gnawing damage to deciduous trees and take the eggs and even the fledglings of songbirds.
Not that it should be entirely blamed for the plight of our native squirrel. the past century and a half has seen the destruction of much of its woodland habitat in England and, as commercial coniferous forestry became lucrative in the early 20th century, red squirrels became targeted for the damage they do to young pine trees. In the next 30 years at least 85,000 were wantonly killed.
Yet the extermination of the grey squirrel has so far proved elusive. From the late Seventies, indeed, it became politically impossible – no more acceptable to the public than whaling, or culling seals – and any attempt to campaign on the issue faltered because it took decades before it was finally understood why grey squirrels are so bad for reds.
Certainly the greys are bigger, bolder and more robust, and for many years it was thought they simply out-competed with the native animal for limited resources.
Grey squirrels spend much time on the ground; reds are loath to leave trees. they can digest acorns and unripe hazelnuts; reds cannot eat either. they also – how American – have much better memories.
Red squirrels are most industrious in hoarding caches of nuts, but – of lesser brain – very bad at recalling where they are. But even all this, surely, could not account for the collapse of their numbers?
then, in the 1980s, red squirrels were sighted in Lancashire, with facial lesions that prevented them eating and of which malady they expired within a week.
this, it was soon established, was the squirrel parapox virus – ‘squirrelpox’ or SPPV for short – and two anomalies were soon noticed.
For one, the plague was unique in Europe to the United Kingdom. Red squirrel populations on the mainland Continent were unaffected. For another, grey squirrels appeared immune.
‘Scientists finally uncovered the full story in the early 1990s,’ writer Patrick Barkham last year observed, ‘when new blood-testing technology revealed the role of greys as a carrier of squirrelpox.
‘the test found that 60-70 per cent of greys carried the infection but did not succumb to it.
‘No British grey has ever been found dead from the virus, but every red squirrel that has ever contracted it has died. It is a pattern repeated around the world when non-native animals introduce new diseases to “naive” populations.’
Only now was it at last understood why the introduction of the American grey squirrel, quite harmless on its own continent, to our shores had been so catastrophic. Small wonder that, considering its damage to forestry and birds, the International Union for Conservation of Nature puts it in the top 100 most harmful invasive species in the world.
As public awareness has grown, emboldened advocates of the red felt confident enough by 2015 to bid for the eradication of the alien grey.
Red Squirrels United, pulling together 30 different conservation organisations and dozens of related initiatives, was established.
Its patron is Prince Charles, it has been awarded £3million of Heritage Lottery Fund cash and it is the largest organisation in Europe devoted
unblushingly to the extermination of a given animal species.
There are now thousands of volunteers killing greys in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
As of June last year, Julie Bailey – a flame-haired and former gymnast in Cumbria – had personally lured and shot 469. Her living room is a ‘shrine to the red squirrel’; her deep freeze is packed with the neatly bagged meat of the grey. ‘Very healthy meat… it falls off the bone like pulled pork.’
MOST of the hunters use baited cagetraps before tipping the grey squirrel into a plastic bag and thwacking it firmly on the head with a stout stick – a procedure officialdom describes as ‘cranial despatch’.
Experts under the auspices of the UK Squirrel Accord are meanwhile perfecting an oral contraceptive for grey squirrels and there is continued and parallel bidding to win over hearts and minds: the Ulster Wildlife Trust, for instance, is producing a children’s book titled The Greedy Grey.
But efforts to annihilate nasty visitors such as the North American signal-crayfish or the Asian hornet from Britain are one thing – slaughtering a cute furry animal quite another, especially in regions where no red squirrel has been seen in half a century.
Inevitably, more than 95,000 people have signed a petition decrying the cull, with such comments as ‘barbaric’ and ‘these creatures are here to stay and part of our countryside now, you cannot turn the clock back’.
There are legitimate grounds for caution. Though ‘invasion biology’ is now an important realm of science, trying to understand and disentangle the havoc wrought by brown rats here and Japanese knotweed there, rhetoric in campaigns such as this (and especially amid the current tensions of Brexit) make many uneasy.
Rather than talk of ‘foreign squirrels’ or ‘alien invaders’, the more thoughtful around Red Squirrels United increasingly use such phrases as the ‘McDonaldisation of ecosystems’.
They rightly point out that it will be a decade before a viable and cost-effective squirrel contraceptive bait is ready and that it could only be used where there are no reds. And that, though a vaccine against squirrel pox is in advanced development, there is not the funding for its production or (very complicated) administration.
Others counter that it is one thing to wipe out a species on a small landmass – North American mink have been all but exterminated in the Outer Hebrides, black rats from the Shiant Isles and, indeed, grey squirrels from Anglesey – but obliterating a widespread woodland animal with a rapid breeding cycle on Britain’s mainland is daunting indeed.
Even those involved find the killing of lactating females – knowing that nearby babies are waiting and must now slowly starve – distressing. Some insist the whole operation is little more than a racket for private landlords.
Of course, we are not quite alone in the British Isles – something very striking has been observed in the Republic of Ireland.
‘If you love grey squirrels,’ panted ecowarrior George Monbiot in 2015, ‘look away now, for Ireland has become a bloodbath...
‘While until recently the greycoats looked invincible everywhere, in around 20 years the frontier has shifted 100 kilometres to the east. At this rate, in another 20 years the last of them will have been driven into the Irish Sea, and Ireland will have been reclaimed by the reds (no political metaphor is intended).’
The killer? The pine marten, an efficiently vicious relative of the stoat and weasel whose numbers are fast recovering after decades of persecution.
Red squirrels and the pinemarten have long lived aside one another in general amity because the reds are all but impossible to catch: light and fleet, they skip to the ends of thin branches that cannot bear a pine marten’s weight.
The relatively burly, non-native grey, spending much time on the forest floor, is another matter; and pine martens have duly feasted.
But even their presence is stressing grey squirrels out. They are notably thinner, and much more reluctant to breed, when pinemartens are about and they must keep watching their backs.
As the greys disappear, the reds are moving back in.
‘The lesson is obvious,’ states Mr Monbiot, ‘to everyone except the dunderheads administering public policy in Britain. If, as they claim, their aim is to eliminate grey squirrels, rather than to pour money into the laps of the landed gentry, they should abandon the useless programme of trapping, shooting and poisoning, and instead bring back a native predator.’
THERE is some truth in this. The pine marten is probably important for our surviving red squirrels. But there is more on the menu here for the mustelids than in Ireland: the field-vole, for instance.
Pine martens, too, prey on domestic poultry and lairds – whose co-operation is essential if red squirrels are to be protected – cannot be expected to enthuse over an animal that also enjoys gamebirds and their eggs.
In the long term, red squirrels are likely – by simple natural selection – to become immune to squirrelpox, as wild rabbits are now largely immune to the myxomatosis that wiped out 99 per cent of our bunnies a half-century ago.
But they do not have the longterm, and we do not have the time. Entire extermination of grey squirrels may well be beyond us.
Yet, if we do not try to undo what the Victorians wrought, our native squirrel cannot survive.