This blog is dedicated to the Penrith & District Red Squirrel group.
As my silhouette stepped into the gloom of
the wood, my presence was announced by the shriek of a blue jay. A piercing and
devilish scream designed to put any copse on high alert. The jay is a
strikingly beautiful bird with atrocious manners and a dreadful song .. the
A-list movie star of the British wood. I slipped up against a tree trunk,
mentally thanking the gaudy little crow .. not! Yet there was an irony in her
unwanted greeting. Though she was high on my list of 'most wanted', for reasons
I will explain later, her mortal enemy was my prime target today. The jay and
her family exist here, in this forest, on one the same primary food sources as
her nemesis. Both, in the right season, squabble and fight for the same fruit.
The acorn. Where there are jays, there will be grey squirrels. Where there are
grey squirrels, there will be jays. Where there are both .. there will be me.
In this small section of Norfolk woodland,
dressed out with a mixture of deciduous and
coniferous timber, there are ghosts. The spectres and spirits of the
tiny elf-like creatures that once scrabbled and foraged here. They did no harm,
scratching a living amongst the high boughs or the leaf mulch. Magical little
sprites, full of energy and light mischief. Furtive, seldom seen and vulnerable
only to the passing raptor. With an eye to the sky, they could never have seen
the menace that approached from below.
I’m not a local, nor of an age to recall,
so I can only trust the folklore recounted hereabouts. The old folk tell me
that the red squirrel was abundant here in the woods of East Anglia when they
enjoyed their youth. Even they, though, missed the slow and gradual eviction of the native squirrel under
the tsunami of grey squirrel migration. The tiny red was bullied and badgered
from it’s territories and contaminated with a deadly pox carried by its New
World interloper.
If the grey squirrel was the Marilyn Monroe
of the wood and park .. cute, brash and always on display .. then the red
squirrel was the Greta Garbo. Sultry, shy and rarely seen. The whole world
loves a flirt. Marilyn won. Greta faded away into obscurity. So did the red
squirrel in England, except for a few remote enclaves. Thankfully, some of
those havens have been adopted by conservationist groups who recognise that to
restore the red squirrel population means culling its antithesis, the grey, to
ensure survival. Sarah, Jerry and Tom undertake such work up there in Penrith
.. with encouraging success.
But back to my own little corner of
England. Denied such magic, all I can do is keep trying to hold back the grey
tide.Cute? Not in my book. Its doe-like eyes miss nothing and, like that jay I
saw earlier, no songbird or gamebird nest is safe from its predation. I cull hundreds of these pests every year
but nature abhorrs a vacuum and every void I create is quickly filled within
months by immigrants from neighbouring carrs and copses. It is a constant war
of attrition. I just pray that my friends up there in Penrith keep manning the
barricades. Our native red squirrel depends on them.
www.wildscribbler.co.uk
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c.Ian Barnett 2013
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