This art print of a woodland red squirrel is designed to bring a little woodland wildlife to your walls. This lovely little squirrel is surrounded by Scots pine, hawthorn and hazel, along with woodland mushrooms. Sold unframed, the print is available in A3 or A4 size, by artist Claire Tuxworth.
Red squirrels are endangered, but this is not just because of grey squirrels carrying squirrelpox virus, as is often reported. In fact, their main risk is lack of pine trees (which is why red squirrels thrive in Northumberland and the Scottish Highlands, where they enjoy their natural habitats).
In a nutshell, red squirrels die of disease due to poor immunity caused by lack of natural habitats (and being fed the wrong food by humans). Whereas grey squirrels eat high-calorie nuts (not peanuts as they carry a mouldy toxin) as their main diet, red squirrels feed more on small seeds from conifer cones.
Due to current laws only protecting red squirrels, experts say it’s kindest to not encourage grey squirrels to feed in your garden (avoid ‘squirrel-proof feeders’ as these clever creatures can get trapped). Also fix roof damage, and block access points where needed.
London charity Urban Squirrels is campaigning to change the law, so grey squirrels can legally be rescued and released. It says that feeding stations to help red squirrels, ironically concentrate small areas for the squirrelpox virus to spread. Read more on how to help both red & grey squirrels.
Grey squirrels (though some have ginger fur) mostly eat hazelnuts and pine cones, caching food to take back to their ‘drey’ made out of leaves and bark in trees. Red squirrels are smaller with larger ears. Red squirrels were originally from Scandinavia but have lived in England for thousands of years, and grey squirrels were accidentally released in Victorian times, after being introduced from North America.
There are Simple Solutions to Help Red Squirrels
This is quite a similar story to cattle TB and badgers. Knee-jerk reactions to ‘cull badgers’ when cattle-to-cattle vaccination is the simple answer. A report from Bristol University says culling greys won’t work, and there are simple answers to help prevent this awful disease (which grey squirrels are immune to, but red squirrels are not):
Rewild endangered pine martens. Almost hunted to extinction for their fur in Victorian times, pine martens are mostly only still found in northern England and the Scottish Highlands. But in areas of England where they have been rewilded, grey squirrel populations have rapidly gone down, as pine martens are natural predators.
Move red squirrels to some of England’s islands. It would be a small price to pay for us not seeing red squirrels in our parks. But until squirrelpox vaccinations were underway, this would enable red squirrels to be safe and thrive, as there would be no nearby grey squirrels to catch the disease from. This would be a far easier, kinder and cheaper solution that culling all grey squirrels.
Use oral contraceptives to control grey squirrel populations. This is done using a kind of ‘Nutella’ bait to administer medicine, to stop over-population. Already an injectable vaccine has been created (studies are underway to produce an oral version, which of course could be administered instead, preventing the problem at source).
