Grey squirrels…. hmmmm

Whenever our cats have gone for squirrels the squirrels have been vicious buggers.

Presley must be nails!

Interested to hear the anti-hunting folks’ solution to dwindling red numbers.

Whatever solution may or may not be presented does not have any bearing on whether hunting them is actually effective or not (and it would appear not to be effective if earlier posts on this thread are to be believed).

stumpy01 – Member

Our squirrel invasion hasn’t been so bad since we got Presley.

He makes quite a racket dragging them through the cat flap, but he does look massively smug when he presents you with his latest gift

Little Git!!

Presley looks please in that photo. 😀 Nice kitty.

I would encourage him to hunt a bit more so you get free meal and don’t forget to share it with Presley.

We used to have a dog that hunted giant monitor lizard and when he got one my mum would skin the lizard then make them into nice herbal soup. The dog get the share of the meat too after cooking that is.

A while back I had a squirrel that kept getting into the garage and leaving nuts in my bike shoes. Hated that bastard, especially when it progressed to berries.
Kill them all. 😆

I had a squirrel that kept getting into the garage and leaving nuts in my bike shoes. Hated that bastard, especially when it progressed to berries.

Mmm shuesli

A while back I had a squirrel that kept getting into the garage and leaving nuts in my bike shoes.

He was peanutting in your shoes

interested to hear the anti-hunting folks’ solution to dwindling red numbers.

Reds are declining mostly due to habitat destruction. Humans (you’ll be unsurprised to hear, I’m sure) have a much greater impact than Greys do. They’re just a more convenient scapegoat.

cranberry – Member

Whenever our cats have gone for squirrels the squirrels have been vicious buggers.

Presley must be nails!

Yeah. He doesn’t mess about.
Lovely temperament though – really relaxed & gentle; just not with the local wildlife!

He got 3 last yr I think; that was the first one.
The second one he’d abandoned on the landing without a head and the third was again on the landing, but he’d decided not to decapitate it.

A woman a few doors down feeds the squirrel’s monkey nuts; which they then bring into the garden to bury in the lawn or in any available plant pot. They cause a right mess, so the less squirrel’s in the area, the better.
We’ve stopped encouraging birds into the garden (see Presley above), but we grow plenty of bee friendly flowering plants and I try to encourage spiders, ladybirds etc. in with insect houses, spaces for them to hide etc.
We’ve got a hogitat, but haven’t had any hedgehogs staying in it. We do get regular hedgehog visits though & I put food down for them in the winter.

My Nan used to live next to a canal. She would trap squirrels and drown them in the canal

RSPCA will prosecute for that sort of thing

They can try, she’s been dead 5 years. 91 years, gawd bless ‘er.

what makes an animal “vermin”?

not sure they count as vermin but grey squirrels are invasive alien species if you didn’t know. Terrible news for our native red squirrels 🙁

Just me or is that squirrel faking it in that Presley shot up there ^^^^ ?

Is it legal to shoot squirrels? If so why not cats because they are the very definition of vermin !

I think it’s ok to kill most things as long as it’s done in a humane way.

longj – Member

Is it legal to shoot squirrels? If so why not cats because they are the very definition of vermin !

and as discussed earlier, so are humans…. not sure your vermin ‘reasoning’ to kill cats holds up well.

If you speak to anyone in forestry, you’ll find that squirrels do an unbelievable amount of damage to trees, including ring barking the leaders and generally eating the bark

z1ppy – Member
longj – Member
Is it legal to shoot squirrels? If so why not cats because they are the very definition of vermin !
and as discussed earlier, so are humans…. not sure your vermin ‘reasoning’ to kill cats holds up well.

From a moral stand point you’d be hard pushed to define humans as vermin and hence introduce extermination programmes.

not sure they count as vermin but grey squirrels are invasive alien species if you didn’t know.

As, of course, are rabbits. They’ve just been here a lot longer

Terrible news for our native red squirrels

I’ve seen a few red squirrels. They are kind of cute and fluffy. I suppose thats why nobody ever describes them as “rats with fluffy tails”.

From a moral stand point you’d be hard pushed to define humans as vermin and hence introduce extermination programmes.

errr ditto from the pet loving country… no idea how acurate this is[/url] but UK is known for it love of animals (no jokes please)

somewhatslightlydazed – Member
what makes an animal “vermin”?

Dyslexic parents that like the name Vernon

3 this year so far and counting. Head shots knock them down promptly. Haven’t had the nerve to nibble one yet…they STINK. Mind you the last roe deer I shot was a bit stinky too and it tasted awesome. Planning on a fallow next time and then spit roasting it over the fire pit. Maybe I could spit roast 100 squirrels at once…..

Maybe I could spit roast 100 squirrels at once…..

Not sure if that would be legal…

The answer to your grey squirrel problem is pine martens. C/o George Monbiot

How to eradicate grey squirrels without firing a shot – an astonishing tale of ecological restoration.

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 20th January 2015

Is there anything more stupid than the government’s plan to kill grey squirrels?

I ask not because I believe – as Animal Aid does – that grey squirrels are harmless. Far from it: they have eliminated red squirrels from most of Britain since their introduction by Victorian landowners, and are now doing the same thing in parts of the Continent. By destroying young trees, they also make the establishment of new woodland almost impossible in many places. As someone who believes there should be many more trees in this country, I see that as a problem. A big one.

No, I oppose the cull for two reasons. The first is that it’s a total waste of time and money. Here’s what scientists who have studied such programmes have to say:

“To date, there has been no successful method developed in the long-term control (nor indeed the eradication) of grey squirrel populations. … a recovery in numbers was found to take place within 10 weeks of intensive culling programs.”

You pour the money in and it pours out the other side. The government’s plan to sponsor an “eradication programme” to the tune of £100 per hectare per year is futile; though it will have the effect of transferring even more public money to rural landowners.

I doubt you’ll be surprised to hear that the idea was approved by the former environment secretary Owen Paterson, whose primary mission in office appears to have been showering his chums with gold, while ruthlessly cutting any spending that might have delivered wider benefits. This was the man, remember, who almost doubled the subsidy for grouse moors.

My second reason for opposing the cull is that there is another way of dealing with grey squirrels, which requires hardly any expense, indeed hardly any human intervention at all. Unlike trapping, shooting or poisoning, it works. It is happening with extreme prejudice in Ireland at the moment.

There is a scientific term for this method. Pine martens.

Pine martens are predators native to Britain and most of Europe. They are members of the otter, badger and weasel family (the mustelids), that are at home both on the ground and in the trees. They are, to my eye, exceptionally beautiful. They look like sinuous chestnut cats with yellow bibs. Like many predators they turn out to be essential to the survival of healthy living systems.

It now seems that many exotic species, like grey squirrels, that appear to present intractable problems do so only because they are moving into depleted ecosystems. They become invasive and destructive because there is nothing left to restrain them. American mink, for example, are a major problem in Europe where there are no otters, proliferating rapidly and wiping out water voles, birds and other species. But when otters, which are highly territorial, move in, they drive the mink out. White-tailed eagles, which have recently been reintroduced to the Hebrides, but once lived throughout Britain, prey heavily on mink and, according to a study in Finland, keep them out of areas they would otherwise occupy.

There might be no grey squirrel problem – in fact there might be no grey squirrels here at all – had pine martens not been eliminated across most of their range, primarily by gamekeepers.

If you love grey squirrels, look away now, for Ireland has become a bloodbath. The North American rodents that once occcupied the whole island east of the River Shannon are now in full-scale rout, and the reds are pouring into the territory they have abandoned. While until recently the greycoats looked invincible everywhere, in around 20 years the frontier has shifted 100km 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).

So what’s going on? Well it now seems that the reason why grey squirrels never got past the Shannon is not that they couldn’t cross the river. They can swim, and there are plenty of places in which they could move through the trees without getting their feet wet. It’s because the far side of the Shannon was pine marten territory. And pine martens love grey squirrels – in the strictly carnal sense.

Red squirrels have a simple adaptation to pine martens: they are small and light enough to get to the ends of the branches, where the martens can’t follow. But grey squirrels, which did not co-evolve with these predators, are, by comparison, lumps: slower and heavier than the native species. They are also more terrestrial than the reds: in other words more dependent for their survival on foraging on the woodland floor. Meals on legs, in other words.

As people in Ireland have mostly stopped killing pine martens, which are now legally protected, they have begun to recolonise their former ranges. And the grey squirrels appear to have vanished into thin air. You have to read the paper published on this phenomenon last year to believe just how rapid and comprehensive this process has been. But you probably won’t, so here are some extracts.

“The grey squirrel population has crashed in approximately 9,000 km2 of its former range and the red squirrel is common after an absence of up to 30 years.”

“Grey squirrel sightings accounted for less than 8% of animal sightings in [the Irish Midlands], which is remarkably low considering that they are a much less elusive species than either the red squirrel or the pine marten, and are also more commonly associated with human settlements.”

The health and weight of grey squirrels in the pine marten zone is “extremely poor”, while squirrels in an area without martens “are thriving”.

“This is the first documented evidence of a grey squirrel population retracting, without any human intervention, subsequent to having established itself as an invasive species.”

Two aspects of this story jump out at me. The first is the greys’ astonishing speed of retreat. The numbers just don’t add up: the martens simply couldn’t eat that many squirrels. As the paper points out “it would be unlikely that a low density pine marten population could impact a high density grey squirrel population by direct predation alone.”

The second is that grey squirrels in the region haunted by pine martens are much thinner than those elsewhere. At first sight this makes no sense: with fewer competitors, you would expect the survivors to be fatter and healthier.

So what’s going on? Though the paper doesn’t speculate, there seems to be a likely explanation. The pine martens are creating a “landscape of fear”, rather like the one that some ecologists (though others have now challenged the claim) believe wolves have generated among deer in the Yellowstone National Park. It’s not just that pine martens are eating the squirrels: they are terrifying the living daylights out of them.

If grey squirrels have no defences against martens, they must spend much of the time they would otherwise have spent feeding trying to avoid them. They are likely – metaphorically or perhaps literally – to spend so much time looking over their shoulders while they should be foraging during the summer that they don’t accumulate sufficient fat to get through the winter. The pine martens are starving them out.

The lesson is obvious – 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.

While pine martens are once again thriving in parts of Scotland (and, surprise, surprise, these are the places in which red squirrels also survive and grey squirrels are absent), across England and Wales they are functionally extinct. This means that while there are some tiny remnant populations in a few areas (Cumbria, Snowdonia and the North York Moors for example), due to intense persecution by gamekeepers and others in the past their genetic base is too narrow to allow them to expand.

Re-establishing pine martens means reintroducing them: bringing new genetic stock both to the pockets in which they survive and to places from which they have been eradicated. That is what the Vincent Wildlife Trust, among others, hopes to do.

Meanwhile, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, which I see as a greenwashing agency for the shooting industry (how many conservation groups do you know that teach children to use shot guns and run courses on snaring, lamping and trapping?), is lobbying to reduce pine marten populations in Scotland. Yes, reduce.

It claims that it wants to do so to protect capercaillies: the giant grouse that also once lived across much of Britain but are now confined to a few glens in Scotland. But there is no evidence that pine martens are implicated in the capercaillie’s decline: in fact the capercaillie is doing best where pine martens are also thriving, and doing worst where the predator continues, illegally, to be persecuted.

(I wonder whether there might be a connection? Might pine martens suppress other predators that affect capercaillies? Or are both species victims of the appalling land management practised by “sporting” estates in areas like Deeside?)

The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust’s attitude is typical of the views that have long prevailed amongst shooting interests: all too often estate owners would rather cut their own throats than tolerate the presence of predators, even when those predators are protecting them from massive problems, like grey squirrels or (due to the absence of lynx) exploding roe and sika deer populations.

Unfortunately, it is these entrenched interests and entrenched attitudes that still dominate government policy. The futile plan to cull grey squirrels was hatched at a symposium of chinless wonders convened by the Prince of Wales and Owen Paterson in one of Charles’s many properties, Dumfries House in Scotland.

This meeting took place several months after the Irish study was published. But the British Establishment is almost impervious to new thinking and new information, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that this confederacy of dunces decided to pour millions into a futile gesture, rather than to do something useful. I dare say that most of them still regard pine martens as vermin anyway.

Like the army and navy in the 18th century, the governance of the countryside is still dominated by titled amateurs, while those with professional knowledge and expertise are frozen out.

So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all. Isn’t it time that these grey and ponderous relics of the Victorian era were pushed out of policy-making, and replaced by bright-eyed and bushy-tailed people who are agile enough to respond to new situations?

i quite like squirrels…would shoot a cat over a squirrel any day of the week, horrible things

although in fairness I wouldn’t shoot a cat either…

Fluffy rats: Shoot the mofos!

maybe only 99 then….

People are vermin and are routinely humanely dispatched by peoples other than thee n me

Impressed with Presley 😆 topcat, only ever met another cat that could take down squirrels, his name was Junior because he was the runt of the litter, he had small cat syndrome 😆 a ruthless hunter of anything. The postey reckoned Junior used to stalk him.

DezB – Member
dwindling red numbers

Are you sure? I thought they lived in some places and were non-existent in others
Well, that’s why their numbers are dwindling, the prefered habitats that reds would be found in in the greater part of the UK are also home to greys, which are larger, more aggressive, are ground foraging as well as arboreal, and carry squirrel pox, a virus that reds have no inbuilt immunity to, so they have very few places they can live in England and Wales which aren’t threatened by ever increasing numbers of greys.
And greys don’t just threaten native reds, they’re incredibly destructive to the environment, especially trees, and reduce native bird numbers through raiding the nests for eggs and young.
Scotland is the only main habitat with large numbers, due, possibly, to pine martens, as George Monbiot says in his article.
Interestingly, a young female marten has been filmed in Devon by a young man experimenting with a low-light motion-triggered camera, to the astonishment of experts who’ve seen the footage.
Re-introduction of Martens in England and Wales would be the best possible answer to the squirrel issue, for very little cost.
Except to the little furry buggers, and they would be replaced, in time, by our native, and much less destructive, reds.

Reds are declining mostly due to habitat destruction. Humans (you’ll be unsurprised to hear, I’m sure) have a much greater impact than Greys do. They’re just a more convenient scapegoat.

The statement above is rubbish! Reds are declining due to increasing range of the greys as they have spread north through the uk and the squirrel pox virus that they carry with them.

Threats to the red squirrel
Although red squirrel populations are healthy on mainland Europe, the red squirrel is currently suffering major decline in the UK. Numbers in the UK have fallen from a onetime high thought to be around 3.5 million, to a current estimated population of around 120,000. The population in England is thought to be as low as 15,000.

Predators, viruses and changes to the landscape all pose threats to our native red squirrel but the introduction of the grey squirrel from America is the main reason behind the sharp decline.

Grey squirrels

Grey squirrels were first introduced to England from North America in 1876 as an ornamental species to populate the grounds of stately homes. Around 30 separate introductions occurred until 1930 when the damage caused by the grey squirrel was recognised and it was made illegal to release a grey squirrel to the wild. Grey squirrels have rapidly spread and colonised much of mainland England with detriment to our native red squirrel.

Greys are roughly twice as heavy as red squirrels and can tolerate living in much denser populations than red squirrels in mixed and broadleaf woodlands; with greys achieving up to 15 individuals per hectare (the size of a large football pitch) and reds achieving up to 2-3 per hectare.
Grey squirrels evolved on the eastern seaboard of America in oak and hickory forests. As a result, they have developed a resistance to a chemical called tannin, which is found in seeds such as acorns. Unripe acorns are particularly rich in tannins but are a high-energy food source. Red squirrels find tannins unpalatable, so grey squirrels can decimate crops of acorns before they ripen and become a viable food source for reds. Greys also raid caches (stores) of seeds that red squirrels have buried.

The combination of grey squirrels achieving higher densities, with a higher daily food requirement, and the ability to exploit tannin-rich seeds, provides grey squirrels with a very strong ‘competitive advantage’ over reds in mixed and broadleaf woodland. Failure to gain enough food prevents female reds from reproducing, and existing members of the population can gradually starve. Through the effects of competition alone, greys will replace reds well within 15 years in this habitat type.

Squirrelpox virus
The most significant threat associated with grey squirrels is the spread and transmission of a disease called squirrelpox virus (SQPV). It can take only one grey squirrel to introduce this virus to a local population of red squirrels and then the virus can spread throughout the reds with devastating effect. Where a grey squirrel introduces SQPV, red squirrel population decline has been observed at between 17-25 times quicker than through competition alone.

Find out more here http://www.rsne.org.uk/

camo16 – Member
Just me or is that squirrel faking it in that Presley shot up there ^^^^ ?

😆

It does appear that way, doesn’t it?! Looks like he’s playing dead. But, he had definitely breathed his last.
Never picked up a squirrel until this one. It was surprisingly heavy; I guess it’s just lean muscle and bone under all that fur!

There’s a shoot on sight judgement for grey squirrels here in Dumfries & Galloway, quite right too (and that’s coming from a vegi and bleeding heart liberal) as there’s quite a lot of cheeky red squirrels about in this area – there are loads in my local woods that annoy the hell out of Toby (jack russell) and i have never been out on the bike and not saw a red, thankfully there have no sightings or kills of greys in the area where i stay so i hope that continues.

All I was saying was that I thought the damage was done. Of course I know red squirrel numbers have bloody dwindled. But are they doing so still, or is it a done dwindled deal?

dwindling red numbers

Are you sure? I thought they lived in some places and were non-existent in others

All I was saying was that I thought the damage was done. Of course I know red squirrel numbers have bloody dwindled. But are they doing so still, or is it a done dwindled deal?

Still dwindling.

OK … Never seen a red. Ever.

OK … Never seen a red. Ever.

Head North.

Eat them for sure, surprisingly delicious.

They definitely taste better than rabbit. i.e. “sweeter and not as tough”.

😀

What makes an animal vermin

The Daily Fail? I note a report in recent years about the red kite, in bold: “Vermin…or awesome bird of prey?”

Kestrels too were considered vermin. Likewise Golden Eagles. Not sure about foxes.

I think any wild animal that is conspicuously thriving will at some point fall foul of humans. We modern humans now create enormous insane, unnecessary, arguably criminal amounts of food-waste. Waste that isn’t handled properly, waste that invites scavengers and disease. We’re arguably the ‘top vermin’ but we like to kill things and feel that we’ve achieved something – what better thing to kill than ‘vermin’? As well as each other, of course. Especially ‘those over there’ … you know those (insert racial epithet) vermin. Breeding like rats. Animals, the lot of ’em!

OP – you need a Pine Marten…. Longj – I read something the other day about reintroducing the pine marten to the South West of England.

DezB – Member

OK … Never seen a red. Ever.

Only place I’ve seen one is Whinfell Center Parcs, so not exactly in the wild, even though they were living wild if you get my drift.