Note: Due to some technical difficulties the images are refusing to display in the blogpost itself and you have to click on each one individually to see them. Unfortunately I don’t know how to to fix this problem but I hope you enjoy this post regardless.
Weirdly enough, despite living in Ireland my whole life, last August was my first ever time seeing a squirrel. I encountered a grey squirrel up in the trees when I was in a lovely woodland just north of Tramore Valley Park. Here’s the squirrel!
But of course, grey squirrels are an introduced species. And their presence is making things more difficult for the native red squirrel. So my next mission naturally, would be to find a red squirrel. But where to find one? Everywhere the grey squirrels are, they outcompete the red squirrel. And then I found out, there is a location not far from where I live where there’s a thriving red squirrel population. Fota Island.
Fota Island is most famous for Fota Wildlife Park. I have visited there many times both as a child and an adult, and have pleasant memories of seeing the magnificent giraffes, though these days my preference is to see animals living in their wild, natural environment, which is why I love the fact that you can go to any public park and see wood pigeons, rooks and jackdaws just doing their thing. But there’s another popular attraction on Fota Island that I didn’t know about until recently, called Fota Arboretum. So what is an arboretum?
An arboretum is a living museum of trees and plants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arboretum
So, why do red squirrels like Fota Arboretum? For two reasons. Grey squirrels don’t live on Fota Island. The second reason is that, Ireland is an infamously deforested country. In a perfect world, animals would be able to find their home out in one of the many forests we should have out on our landscape, so Fota Arboretum, with its massive collection of trees, serves as a refuge for a lot of different birds, and also, the red squirrel. So once I learned Fota Arboretum was a haven for red squirrels, I knew I had to be it a visit. So last month I made my first trip to Fota Arboretum.
It didn’t disappoint in terms of the wildlife I saw. Here’s an adorable rabbit!:
And here’s a jackdaw (this one was moving too much to get a good photograph, but anyway!)
And there were a lot of wood pigeons singing that day. Here’s an example of one of my favourite sounds, though sadly not the clearest recording, what I like to call a wood pigeon “choir”. This occurs because the song of wood pigeons is so simple, that if three or more happen to sing at the same time, it’s easier for them to sound harmonious together through sheer coincidence, producing an absolutely lovely sound. Here’s the recording:
https://xeno-canto.org/1179767
On that recording you’ll also hear a robin and a blackbird. And I saw a dragonfly or two. So, a lovely trip to Fota Arboretum, but my mission had not been accomplished. I hadn’t seen any red squirrels! That would have to wait for a future trip, which is why I went back yesterday.
Having seen no red squirrels the previous time, I wasn’t really expecting one on the second trip. I expected it would be a case of, perhaps the tenth trip, the twentieth trip, the thirtieth trip, I would finally see one. I would enjoy the sights and sounds of the many other animals I would encounter in the meantime, but ultimately the first sighting of a red squirrel would have to wait. Or so I thought!
I would have been delighted even if this sighting of a red squirrel was my last, but it wasn’t. I saw many more (or possibly the same one several times in some instances, I couldn’t tell!)
This photo is quite blurry, the squirrels seemed happiest in the darkness of the woodlands so I had to work hard to get some good photos.
This photo brings me a lot of joy. The red squirrel effortlessly hanging onto the side of a tree, as easily as I might walk, being able to “walk” up or down trees is completely natural to them. And, while there is a major danger of anthropomorphism here, I wondered did I have a closer understanding of what the squirrel was thinking than I do of birds. After all, squirrels are fellow mammals, we are much closer to them in evolutionary terms than we are to birds. I always love the moment I was experiencing during this photo, where me, and another sentient lifeform are just looking at each other, studying each other. I’ve experienced this moment with other animals such as foxes, and even jumping spiders! I was wondering what is it like to be this squirrel, what is a day in the life like for this fellow sentient creature, and while I looked at the squirrel, they looked right back at me. I’d like to think the squirrel was wondering similar things about me, maybe, there’s no way to tell, but it’s equally likely, or perhaps more likely, that the squirrel was keeping an eye on me because they viewed me as a threat.
In this next photo I managed to get the squirrel in better lighting, though a leaf obscured the view of their face!:
Seeing how the squirrels move so naturally and so elegantly on the trees helps illustrate why it’s such a damn shame that Ireland is such a deforested country. I have heard a quote, slightly different each time I hear it, that, “in the past a squirrel could go from Malin Head to Mizen Head without ever touching the ground”. And yes, if there was still this level of forestation, there would be no room for humans, but it’s still an absolute shame that if you ever see a “forest” in Ireland, you are probably looking at a Coilte cash crop monstrosity. Trees are only about money, never about increasing the welfare of animals and humans alike. That’s the political consensus in Ireland, and it’s turned our landscape into an absolute hellhole for animals.
This photo makes me wonder about a very important philosophical question that has plagued humankind since its earliest days. Do red squirrels have the cutest tails of all time?
This last photo might be one of my favourites of the bunch, and indeed might become one of my absolute favourites even out of the thousands of wildlife photos I’ve taken over the last two and a half years:
I was very lucky with the lighting, but I feel here I managed to capture the rich, chestnut colour of a red squirrel’s coat.
The squirrels move so fast that not everything I saw is captured in these photos. When I felt I had a few good photos, I put the camera down, and just watched the squirrels running up and down the branches. The skill with which they moved was incredible, for them the trees are a highway that allows them incredible freedom of movement.
So, in this country where concrete, cash crop trees, and, of all things, data centers, are always deemed more important than wildlife, what’s next for the lovely red squirrel? I hate to have to constantly deliver bad news when it comes to wildlife, so hopefully I might be able to deliver a bit of good news!
According to this article from University College Dublin, numbers of both red squirrels and pine martens are on the increase:
It’s lovely to see that the endangered pine marten is also increasing in numbers. But pine martens prey on red squirrels. Isn’t an increase in pine martens the last thing our red squirrel needs? Not necessarily. Have a look at this article:
When pine martens increase in numbers, grey squirrels decrease, and the number of red squirrels actually increases. Nobody is entirely sure why this is. It could be because pine martens prefer to hunt grey squirrels. It could be because red squirrels co-evolved with pine martens, so have developed the skills to escape from pine martens, while grey squirrels, being an introduced species, have not learned any ability to escape from pine martens. Whatever it is, it looks to be a very positive sign, pine martens are on the increase, and this has had the effect of increasing the red squirrel population too.
I hear discussions of eradicating the grey squirrel population in order to save the red squirrels. Perhaps this is the only way to save the red squirrel, but I hope it doesn’t have to be this way. As I see it, grey squirrels were brought to Ireland through no choice of their own, so it would be a very harsh and unpleasant thing to kill them off when they have done nothing wrong. My hope is that the increase in pine martens will be sufficient to keep the numbers of grey squirrel down, so that Ireland can once again become a beautiful home for the lovely red squirrel.
So, pine martens and red squirrels are on the increase. In this world where pretty much all wildlife news is bad news, I’m happy to bring you some good news about our native Irish animals.
