Red squirrels can be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in urban areas

RED squirrels can survive in an urban environment with an Aberdeen project seeing record numbers, say scientists.

A Nottingham Trent University study found cities and towns could support denser populations of red squirrels due to humans leaving them food.

Threats include attacks from pet and feral cats and road deaths, but neither of these had a severe impact.

The paper, in Mammal Review, looked at squirrel studies across the UK and Europe and found the rodents were capable of surviving as long as there was enough green space to nest.

Lead author Kathryn Fingland, a PHD student who works for Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrels, said that the main barrier in urban areas was the invasive grey squirrels, introduced to the UK from America in the 19th century.

“If we manage urban areas, do that effective, targeted grey squirrel control, making sure we have a suitable habitat for them so they’ve got food resources and places to nest, they can live quite happily in urban environments.

“Having people looking out for them is really helpful. If you get sick squirrels people report them very quickly, if you get grey squirrels people report it very quickly,” she said.

The study suggests using rope bridges to allow the squirrels to safely cross roads, and asking cat owners to keep their pets indoors in the mornings when the squirrels are most active.

The Aberdeen project run by Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrels involves trapping and killing grey squirrels to allow the red ones to take over, and relies on reports from the public to measure the growing red squirrel numbers and report sightings of the grey squirrels to keep the population down.

The charity’s figures show sightings in the city growing from 53 in 2018 to 283 in 2019 and 537 in 2020.

Grey squirrels can be humanely killed legally. It’s also illegal to rerelease them into the wild once trapped.