Red squirrel! To borrow a catchphrase from Dug the dog in the movie Up!, we are really excited at even the thought of these little mammals.
On this episode of the Ecolution podcast from RTÉ KIDS, we have a good news story about how pine martens have helped our native red battle back from the brink against the invasive greys.
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With thanks to our expert guest, Dr Colin Lawton from University of Galway, we are here to tell everyone about a really positive nature story. Find out how one keystone species can have a wider impact on the broader Irish ecosystem.
To set the scene Colin brings us back in time to 1911, to the town of Castle Forbes in Co Longford. "The story goes that there was some sort of garden party and one of the gifts being presented were these six pairs of grey squirrels. They would have opened up the baskets, and the squirrels ran out into the woodland, and everybody would have cooed and said, isn't that lovely?"
And to be fair they are cute. Nowadays, people see them and still think they are lovely. But reader, if you were one of their red cousins, this historic day was not so lovely!
According to letters sent in to the Irish Naturalist Journal, a publication from the time, people in neighbouring areas like Westmeath, then Meath and up to Fermanagh were telling the editor that these new grey guys were spotted.
Colin explains: "Over the next 100 years or so took over much of the eastern half of Ireland. And as they did, we start to see the loss of red squirrels from a number of areas. So, the red squirrels and the grey squirrels, there's no interference between them. The grey squirrels don't attack them in any way. They'd actually mutually ignore each other if they're in the same woodland.
"But the grey squirrels are much bigger. They're eating a lot of the food. They also are lazy and they don't scatter hoard. They just eat the food that the red squirrels are burying in different places. It was generally competition that was causing the red squirrels to lose out. They can't compete with this new animal."
Enter the pine marten
The story moves on in a big way thanks to the Irish Wildlife Act in 1976. That was a piece of legislation that protected animals in Ireland - including the pine marten.
Up to that point they were considered a pest and were hunted. Sightings were becoming rarer and rarer in the countryside. But then the new law came into power - and it really worked!
Our expert guest tells us: "It was now illegal to kill pine martens. And so, they were being left alone. They're a very long-lived, slow-breeding animal, and so it takes a long time for them to recover. But they've slowly started to recover. And as they recovered, they were spreading from a few places where they were still found. Like the Burren in Co Clare was a big sort of last refuge for them.
"And so, it's taken 50 years now for the pine marten to get back to its previous numbers. They're really doing well here in Ireland. We'd see denser populations than we have anywhere else in their range across Europe. And as they've gone, they've had this surprise bonus benefit to them in that they've had this impact on the grey squirrels.
"We thought the grey squirrel was here to stay. We thought the red squirrel didn't have a chance. And all of a sudden, the grey squirrels started to disappear. And it's happened in a really quick, from an ecological point of view, a really quick amount of time. Surveys that we did in 2012 and 2019, and we're just doing the latest one at the moment, we've seen a collapse in the grey squirrel population in much of the middle of Ireland, and that's where the pine marten is currently at its densest population.
"It's a really good news story and the impact that the pine marten has had on the grey squirrel doesn't seem to affect the red squirrel in the same way. So, the grey squirrels disappear, the red squirrels actually make a comeback and are happy to live alongside the pine marten, whereas the grey squirrel can't cope."
Squirrel Swap
As we hear from Colin, recent surveys are showing the growing numbers of the red squirrel and if the trend continues then we are looking at big changes across the country.
"At one stage, this would have been maybe 20 years ago, we estimated that there were about 100,000 grey squirrels in Ireland and about 25,000 maybe red squirrels. And now I would say there's more red squirrels than there are grey squirrels across the whole island - we've seen a complete swap over. You're still going to have huge numbers of grey squirrels in certain places.
"They're very good at surviving in parks and where red squirrels aren't so happy. And so, in Belfast and In Dublin in particular, we've got very, very dense grey squirrel populations, and that's a place that time marks just aren't going to get into. They're not going to get into urban areas. It's not a case of the grey squirrels just disappearing altogether. But in the countryside, across most of the middle of Ireland, we've seen a huge reversal of fortunes."
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