Red Squirrel
The red squirrel is England’s only native squirrel.
Image courtesy of Sarah McNeill
The red squirrel is England’s only native squirrel. Its Latin name, meaning common squirrel, is misleading as it is now very rare and on the verge of extinction. There are over a dozen named subspecies of the red squirrel in its natural range which covers a broad belt of land stretching from Spain in the west to Northern China in the east.
Red squirrel numbers have been crashing in England since 1876 when American grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) were imported to decorate country estates from where they then rapidly spread into the surrounding countryside. The larger more aggressive greys were soon outcompeting the native reds for food meaning that the reds were then unable to breed successfully. However even by the early 1900s it was also noted that ‘an epidemic virus’ was destroying red squirrel populations.
Image courtesy of John of Borrowdale
Image courtesy of Sarah McNeill
Image courtesy of John of Borrowdale
It then took three quarters of a century before the virus was belatedly identified in the 1980s as the squirrelpox virus (SQPV) which is carried by the grey squirrels. The virus doesn’t harm the greys but it is fatal for the red squirrels which suffer a slow, agonising death; blinded they starve to death or they contract a secondary infection via the raw flesh of the lesions. Although red squirrels always disappear eventually when grey squirrels arrive, they disappear up to 25 times quicker when the greys are carrying the virus.
The number of red squirrels in England has plummeted from an estimated 2 million to possibly as few as 10,000 with the majority of them surviving in just one forest – Kielder in Northumberland.
The squirrelpox virus is an ecological disaster that has only affected Britain and Ireland so far but if the disease manages to cross to mainland Europe then it would become a global nightmare as it would then threaten all of the world’s red squirrels from Barcelona to Beijing.