Saving the red squirrel

IN the 17th century, Chaucer wrote of ‘squyrels and bestes smale of gentil kynde’; in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare refers to Queen Mab, whose ‘chariot is an empty hazelnut/Made by the joiner squirrel’; and perhaps the most famous literary squirrel is Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. Then there’s William Morris, who used the red squirrel to liven up his tapestries; even today, the image of the tufty-eared red squirrel is used on everything from tea towels to cereal packets. For as long as people have inhabited the British Isles, the inquisitive, scampering squirrel has lived alongside them.

But while a visitor from the 17th century would recognise Potter’s description and drawings of Nutkin as the squirrel they knew, they might not connect him to the now-ubiquitous grey-coated creatures that tourists feed in London parks or that steal from the bird-feeders in one’s garden. The grey squirrel that exists in huge numbers across much of England was introduced from the US in the 19th century and