The Gray Squirrel

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND — Gray squirrels. They are overweight, oversexed and over here.

They are a menace for many Brits, another depressing example of increasing American hegemony. The gray squirrel, sciurus carolinensis, is not native to Britain. It was introduced from the US during Victorian times, and its unstoppable proliferation since — there are now more than 2.5 million — has led to the slow, agonizing decline of its native cousin, sciurus vulgaris, the red squirrel.

The poor red squirrel is another victim in the ongoing transatlantic culture war. Once common, even iconic, across the country, there are now perhaps as few as 140,000 left, mainly in Scotland and a few "pockets" in England and Wales where active measures are taken to prevent numbers from falling further. All thanks to the gray. Those are competition statistics that should have McDonalds, Coca-Cola and the like taking notes.

Weighing at least a third more than its red variant, the gray squirrel is the typical American variation upon a theme: bigger, blander, more numerous and foisted upon a market irrespective of actual preference. (Pick a color you like. Did you pick gray? Exactly.)

If you've never seen a red squirrel, a gray one looks fairly cute, with its little claws and inquisitive eyes, not to mention its lack of shyness, its approachability. But one glance of a red and the grays begin to look like acrobatic rats. Their coat does not shine like a red's, their tails are not as bushy and their ears are without the red's pointy tufts of auburn fur — all of which helped define Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin so memorably.

In popular British mythology, grays attack, even kill red squirrels. Anyone who has read "The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin" would rightly recoil in horror at the thought of him being savagely clawed by a faceless gray assassin, but there is, a touch unfortunately, no truth in the fantasy. Competition between the two species, while serious, is more subtle. Reds are largely arboreal and rarely seen on the ground. Their diet is mainly pine cone seeds and hazelnuts. Grays, however, run shamelessly anywhere, existing even in urban and suburban areas, and their tastes are less refined — as well as devouring hazelnuts earlier in the season, preempting reds, they are happy to raid trash bins and bird tables and even break into "squirrelproof" birdfeeders.

Their rampaging behavior spells doom for the red — a recently published report commissioned by Mammals Trust UK declared their "eventual extinction" in mainland England to be "inevitable" (it also detailed the water vole's similar fate at the hands of the American mink) — but it could have much wider implications. When gray squirrels have finished gobbling up the reds's foodsource and fattening themselves on other poached goods, they set about threatening the sustainability of Britain's forests by stripping bark and eating the young shoots of broadleaved trees such as beech, oak and sycamore. If gray squirrel density reaches 12 per acre — across the south of Britain the average is 20 — the effect can be devastating. Trees are prevented from growing properly, turning woodland into scrub and threatening not just the red squirrel but several bird species that inhabit large trees or depend upon high tree canopies.

There are laws surrounding the onslaught — a 1938 law makes it illegal to import gray squirrels, and it is also illegal to release them back into the wild once they have been trapped (they must be "dispatched humanely," no drowning or battering) — but they are ineffective in practice. Only the zealous and the paid have the necessary time and equipment to stalk the country snatching gray squirrels, and they are not large enough in number to stop the rot. (In an ironic twist, the US itself is replete with red squirrels — not the geniune article of British lore, of course, but the unrelated tamiasciurus hudsonicus. They're not fooling anyone.)

So it will remain that most people in Britain have never seen a red squirrel, and despite the odd poll there is no urgent concern that for generations to come sciurus vulgaris will exist only in ecology textbooks and Beatrix Potter reprints. After all, there are surely more serious things than squirrels to worry about. This is the 21st century. There are big problems to tackle.

Well, maybe. But all Brits should consider that one day there will be no red squirrels to speak out for them ... and there might be no broadleaved woodland in which to run and hide.

— Louis Cooke (louis@mintcake.com)