GARDENING FOCUS: BACK TO NATURE


THE RED SQUIRRELS REALLY DID PERFORM


“My young guest was still unpacking his camera when the first red squirrel appeared.”


Covid social distancing rule because they all gave each other a very wide berth. Apparently they are very querulous amongst themselves. Hugh put some hazelnuts on the


This month our intrepid gardening expert, Graham Paskett goes in search of some rare red squirrels as part of his work with the Red Squirrel Survival Trust and gets a rare glimpse of these endangered creatures.


I recently drove


over the Menai Strait bridge to Anglesey as part of my work with the Red Squirrel


Survival Trust. I was taking a young photographer who had been online to say that one of the subjects he most wanted to photograph was a red squirrel. They are delightful but difficult animals to see because you never know where they are in the woods and forests. I had been tipped off that a location on the island was one of the very few where a sighting is almost guaranteed. The weather was


atrocious,


stair-rod straight rain and in huge volumes. We had both got wet weather gear and my goodness if was tested to its limits.


Dedicated site The


site was on a wooded by


exposed bluff above a small river that was filling up fairly rapidly. The reach our site involved a stiff climb up a very muddy and steep


30 DIY WEEK OCTOBER 2022


path that demanded concentration to ensure you remained upright. The area itself is a semi-circle in heavy woodland with a number of young oak trees and a range of natural wooden posts and rails, a small watering hole and three small stone piles, all with natural hollows into which their favourite hazelnuts in their shells and cobnuts, also in shells, had been placed. The man who created this arboreal idyll, is a former solider named Hugh. There was some bench seating, no more than two metres from where the reds would feed. Now, I’m normally a fairly positive sort of chap but, after decades of seeking reds and Atlantic salmon, usually without success, I wasn’t full of optimism as the third or fourth stream of rain poured down my neck. This reminded me of my wife’s last advice before I left home, “Don’t forget your towelling neck scarf, its going to be very wet.” Why is she always right? And of course, I forgot the scarf.


One of the things that surprised me was that Hugh was talking in


a normal volume in his delightful Welsh accent. My young guest was still unpacking his camera when the first red squirrel appeared. I had forgotten both how small


and utterly delightful they are. This one whipped across one of Hugh’s lateral natural wooden posts and sat itself down to crack open a hazelnut. Hugh assured me it was a female, or sow. She sat there but moved away as soon as my colleague’s camera was out of its waterproof bag. He was crestfallen and looked round at Hugh and asked, “will that be it for the day?”


This particular squirrel was fairly dark in colour with an almost black tail. But within two or three minutes she was back and very quickly others came leaping over the site, eating and drinking from the pond. The males or boars seemed to rush in, grab a nut, and just as quickly disappear but returning regularly. The first half dozen or so were all fairly dark and then came the brilliantly red or ginger coloured squirrels. Strangely, they have clearly heard about the two-metre


ground just in front of my young photographer friend and eventually he was rewarded with a sow sitting down almost at his feet cracking open the nut casing.


National charity It is truly an absolutely idyllic spot and yet, a few people, happily just a few, do cause damage. One group of young people pulled out the seating that guests use to see the reds. Another let her dog off the lead and it rushed at the squirrels and frightened them away for the rest of the day, ruining the trip for the other guests.


The vast majority who stumble on this unmarked and unpublicised spot are so thrilled at what they see and totally respect the site. There are no grey squirrels on Anglesey and several separate populations of reds. The Red Squirrel Survival Trust is a national charity dedicated to protecting the red squirrel population across the UK.


grey squirrels from America


The reds are an indigenous species in Britain and, until the mid-1800s it was our only one. That was when small numbers of


were released in parkland as a novelty species. Today there are an estimated 2.7 million greys and just 270,000 reds. Many of the greys carry a pox that is harmless to them but fatal to reds and part of the RSST’s work is ensuring that the two species do not intermix. Happily, they cannot interbreed.


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