Going Grey

 Long-time readers of this blog might recall that I have often written harsh words against the Grey Squirrel (or, as I was more likely to call it, the Bushy-Tailed American Tree Rat). Well, I have had a change of mind (yes, it can happen) and am now much more kindly disposed towards the grey blighters – thanks to reading Squirrel Nation: Reds, Greys and the Meaning of Home by Peter Coates, which I reviewed for that excellent magazine Literary Review. Here is my review, which went out under the great title 'They Come Over Here, Take Our Nuts' – 

'Here is a thought experiment: what if the grey squirrel was native to this country, and Britain had been invaded by ‘alien red squirrels from continental Europe’, who had largely usurped ‘our’ native grey? Would we feel about the grey as we now feel about the red, and vice versa? The thought experiment was imagined by sciurologist (squirrel expert) John Gurnell, and the answer is probably yes, we would cherish the imperilled native grey just as we do our real-world native red. The fact is that, as Peter Coates makes clear in this magisterial survey of Britain’s ‘squirrel wars’, there is little real difference between greys and reds, apart from the grey’s greater adaptability and superior food-finding skills. Before ‘the sanctification of Squirrel Nutkin’ (Coates’s phrase) by Beatrix Potter and others, the red squirrel (then more usually known as the common or brown squirrel) was widely regarded as a pest, guilty of the same bad habits that are now laid at the door of the grey – eating birds’ eggs and nestlings, damaging trees, getting into places where it ought not to be, being altogether too curious, mischievous and greedy. Squirrel Nutkin himself, for all his cuteness, is a deplorable character, suicidally reckless in his tormenting of Old Brown the owl. Beatrix Potter had no qualms about getting a gamekeeper to shoot a red for her so she could boil it down to a skeleton to ensure her drawings of Nutkin and friends were anatomically accurate.
  It was only with the coming of the American grey squirrel, originally introduced into England by the Duke of Bedford in 1876, that attitudes to the red began to soften as antipathy to the foreign usurper grew, until, with the grey clearly taking over from the red across most of the country, entrenched positions were adopted, overwhelmingly in favour of the red. A bizarre form of culture war raged for decades, in the columns of the press, in children’s and even adult fiction and in both houses of parliament – especially the Lords, where ‘another imperilled species’, the hereditary peers, were vehement in their loathing of the American invader and insistent that the brutes must be eliminated by any means. Successive governments launched campaigns to try to contain the spread of the grey – poisoning, bounty schemes (‘a bob a brush’), introducing predators, encouraging the eating of greys, lacing squirrel food with contraceptives. It was always a losing battle; even containment, let alone elimination, proved impossible in most places. The American grey squirrel is perfectly suited to its adopted home and the foods available (unlike the red, the grey can digest the tannins in acorns, a major advantage). This country was a new America to the greys, at least as good as their old homeland.
  But was it only the fact they were so well adapted, with superior survival skills, that accounted for the grey’s dominance and the red’s disappearance from so many of its old haunts? Did not the greys physically attack reds, eat their young and drive them from their territory? Did they not infect the native reds with squirrel pox virus (which they carried but were immune to)? Coates surveys the research and finds that there is little good evidence for either of these supposed factors. Rather the evidence is that the red squirrel, a continental species at the western extreme of its range, was in decline before the grey take-over, and the arrival of the formidably competitive grey accelerated, rather than caused, the loss of reds. As its subtitle suggests, Coates’s book – surely the best and most complete there will ever be on this subject – considers the deeper meanings of the ‘squirrel wars’. As he points out, ‘Britain’s squirrelscapes are moral landscapes’: love of reds and antipathy to greys springs from deep-seated feelings about home, nation and land, and distaste for the foreigner, the invader, especially one so pushy and un-English as the grey squirrel. No wonder antipathy to the greys has been, and still is, so strong, despite the fact that many, especially those living in towns, are very fond of the supposed invaders. All squirrels are, as Coates puts it, ‘bumptious, nimble charismatics’ with enormous charm, for all their bad habits. Surely we can learn to live with, even love, both. For the record, Auberon Waugh, distinguished former editor of this magazine, was a staunch defender of the grey.'
(Actually they cut that last sentence, but I've reinstated it here.)