averilburystedmunds: They come over here, take our nuts .....

Grey squirrel in Abbey Gardens

I suddenly noticed several months ago that the squirrels in the Abbey Gardens had almost disappeared. Before, the sight of numbers of them, scampering across the grass, hurtling themselves through throngs of pecking pigeons, or dashing up trees, among branches and down again with dizzying speed, was commonplace. And much enjoyed by most passers-by. And then came rather a squirrel desert in the Gardens.

I stopped to pass the time of day with a dog walker the other day; her dog was barking furiously, straining at the lead while looking up towards a mature tree. “He knows there’s a family of five squirrels up there” she explained, “ and he wants to get at them!” I confided my bewilderment at the sudden lack of squirrels around generally and she told me that she was pretty sure that the gardeners would have poisoned them. I was horrified! Only then did I learn that a year or two earlier, during a single night, the 280 expensive, special bulbs [“Bought from Holland”, she explained helpfully, to account for their assumed high value!] planted in the Abbey Garden flower beds, had been eaten by the squirrels. “The gardeners hate them,” she added. “They are vermin you know. My husband calls them tree rats.”

Since then, I have become a squirrel supporter, in sympathy with their plight, and regret at the aesthetic loss to the Abbey Garden-scape. In August's Literary Review I so appreciated a review of Peter Coates’ Squirrel Nation: Reds, Greys and The Meaning of Home.” It recounts the struggle between red and grey squirrels in Britain over a century and a half. I loved the title of the essay, “They come over here, take our nuts ….” an obvious echo of the popular chant during WW2 about American soldiers. “Over-paid, over-sexed, over here.”

A rather curved photo showing
a 1955 poster offering booty of
One shilling per tail.

Prof. Peter Coates

The grey squirrel was introduced here from America in 1876 and in the one hundred and fifty years’ overlap of the two colours in British residence, can be seen the outright public and official hostility to the newcomers which ebbed and flowed for about a century. Very, very gradually it has reduced and almost, but not quite, tapered off to today’s general public view of squirrels normally being grey, though there are still strong hostile pockets of grey-resistance. The superior abilities of the grey squirrel, perceived as the foreign invader, have, in that period, enabled it to flourish hugely, while the number of ‘our’ native red has declined greatly as they have retreated defensively to the Lake District and parts of Scotland leaving the rest of the country to the greys. Coates describes in incredible detail the colonisation of Britain by the greys despite hostility from the general public and Parliament which included repeated accusations of red murder by the greys, plus official campaigns for what can only be described as, “Death to the greys” with One Shilling rewards for grey squirrel tails. The book explores in impressive detail, how the struggle between native Reds and American Greys, relates to such contemporary human issues as belonging, nationalism, citizenship and the defence of borders.

Avi Steinberg

Avi Steinberg writes [April 14, 2016], of what he labels “the Squirrel Problem”; he avers that underlying any discussion of Reds v Greys, lies the tacit assumption of the proximity between human and squirrel and further, that this close relationship means something. This ‘something’ is, the fact [often ignored], that we are party to a social contract with the squirrel. Unlike rabbits, rats, mice, deer, squirrels live on our level, in the open as if by right, and share many human traits. They save and plan ahead, obsessively; they make deposits and debits [mostly of nuts and seeds]; they establish highways and routes [always returning to familiar paths among and around trees]; they are attached for often long periods to their homes, [they can inhabit the same nest, re-furbished from time to time, for many years]; refrigerate staple foods like pine cones; dry delicacies like mushrooms. They work the day shift and sleep at night. And, Steinberg claims, they gamble in the market place. Most animals breed as food becomes available but squirrels have developed the ability to predict a future seed glut and reproduce accordingly. This is behaviour similar to that of the bullish investor!! David La Spina writes in the New York Times, “They are like us and right there with us , our honored frenemies.”

Nicholas Lezard

In this week’s New Statesman, [August 23^rd] ‘ Nicholas Lezard’s column is entitled, “A furry burglar leaves me cheeseless and reeling”. He adds, pained, ‘The squirrel needn’t have stolen my last bit of Camembert. It had only to ask’. Lezard lives in some poverty-stricken disarray and he describes in heart-broken terms, stumbling into his kitchen to find the treat he had carefully saved, a quarter wheel of Camembert, wrapped and in its box, left on the windowsill near a barely open window, had gone. Only the crumpled waxed paper and shreds of box remained. Having interrupted the squirrel twice before, rummaging among the detritus on his kitchen counter, in a flat two flights up, Lezard easily identified the culprit and rants about the injustice of his loss, claiming to be an animal lover now experiencing feelings of violation. His lease forbids pets and he had been fantasising that a friendly visiting squirrel could have been acceptable. But he muses sadly on the stolen Camembert: “not the cheap stuff but Isigny-Ste-Mere sold at Waitrose for £4.90. A squirrel would have to work long and hard to afford to buy a cheese like that with its own money.” As ever, Lezard nails the heart of the situation; squirrels are almost human.