Excited by squirrels

The subject of grey squirrels has come up a few times on this blog.  Yesterday I met a couple of representatives of the Red Squirrel Survival Trust.  We had a very good discussion.

To tell you the truth, I was a bit nervous about it, as I was a little worried that we might be asked to get out our guns and start blasting away at grey squirrels all over the UK.  And that fear was based on previous discussions on this subject with others.  But yesterday's talk was very sensible - and actually quite exciting.

There is no doubt that the decline of the red squirrel is caused by the non-native grey squirrel.  A combination of competition for resources and the spreading of a disease that kills off the reds cause the reds to disappear. 

And the decline of the red squirrel has been every bit as dramatic as the decline of the corncrake - both have been lost from huge areas of the country where they were common at the beginning of the last century.  Now because the corncrake's decline has been pretty much entirely caused by land use changes our successful programme to reverse the decline has focussed on working with land owners and managers to provide the right habitat.  For red squirrels there is plenty of suitable habitat but it is currently occupied by disease-carrying grey squirrels.  So any red squirrel conservation programme has to deal with the greys - and since they cannot be chatted up and persuaded to move that means either moving them or killing them (to put it bluntly!)(although the possibility of feeding them sterilising drugs is always raised as a distant possibility).

Now my problem with previous discussions about this subject has been that the enthusiasm for killing grey squirrels has seemed to me to overwhelm any thoughts about whether that killing would actually do any good for the red squirrel.  We had a very different and thoughtful discussion yesterday. 

I learned about the success of conservation action on Anglesey where a few red squirrels survived but greys were taking over, before a combination of a cull of greys and topping up of the red population seems to have been very successful.

A successful conservation programme for red squirrels needs to protect the habitat of red squirrels where they still thrive (places like our own nature reserve at Abernethy which is a great place to see red squirrels), stopping the spread of grey squirrels and the transmission of squirrel pox disease (this has to be targetted at the Scottish/English border and we are cooperating with this work on our nature reserves in the north of England and south Scotland) and the setting up of new populations in former parts of the range (maybe there are some RSPB nature reserves which could play a part here).  This programme is not easy, nor will success be achieved quickly - but there is a rational basis for effective action here.  And that's what excited me about the discussion.  I suppose that through not knowing enough about the details I had almost written off any prospects of success with reversing the decline of red squirrels - but yesterday's discussion brought me up to speed and convinced me that progress was possible (even though not assured!).

I was also glad that the impacts of grey squirrels on woodland birds were not overstressed.  Certainly greys eat birds' eggs and nestlings - but then so do reds!  And the evidence that greys have been important in the declines of any of our declining woodland species is meagre (despite people, including us, having looked quite hard).  Many of the declining woodland birds are declining right across Europe - and there aren't grey squirrels anywhere else in Europe apart from northen Italy. 

So I was excited by the discussion we had with the Red Squirrel Survival Trust and we look forward to working with them and all other rational red squirrel conservationists.  So enthusiastic was I that I talked to some colleagues about it over lunch and am grateful to one of them for pointing out this interesting report, that pine martens may help stop the spread of grey squirrels.  Of course, pine martens were once very common across much of the UK and it is possible that their persecution and removal created the conditions under which greys found it much easier to spread.  Interesting!