They cause quite a bit of damage here; Bird feeders emptied or destroyed in minutes, pots & borders dug up, flower buds eaten from fruit and other trees, fruit taken or damaged before ripe. Not on my list of favourite wild animals. Also quite annoying when they are competing with magpies (who have a remarkably similar call) to see who can 'croak' the loudest!
A trowel in the hand is worth a thousand lost under a bush.
Never seen a Squirrel of any species dig up pots or bulbs. All thrushes including Blackbird, Song Thrush, Mistle Thrush, Redwing & Fieldfare make a career of that and do it daily.
Never seen a Squirrel of any species dig up pots or bulbs. ...
Oh, I promise you ... I've sat at my desk and watched them (greys) dig up all the crocus corms the children at the respite centre planted the previous day ... the thing is, they ate some and buried/planted the rest elsewhere
“I am not lost, for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost.” Winnie the Pooh
I live 1km from a wood where I have seen red squirrels while walking the dog, but I've never seen one in my garden, despite it being heavily scrubby, and having lots of wind belts between us and the woods, I think it's a combination of a couple of open fields, a canal (with several crossings) and a very healthy population of large birds of prey.
I'm afraid you learn from experience Dave. Be thankful you haven't had the Squirrel experience
To be fair I have done a couple of impact assessments on Grey Squirrel many years ago but that's all relating to their interaction with native wildlife and not gardens. It's just one of my bugbears the way that some conservationists started to find it trendy to insist all non native wildlife should be destroyed. This was just about the time that ecological assessment became a well paid job! Locally many years ago a major road development was stopped for over a year to retrieve around 6 Great-crested Newts at a fee of half a million to the assessors and God knows how many millions lost to the developers.
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if they cause problems then I don’t want to know about it!
It's just one of my bugbears the way that some conservationists started to find it trendy to insist all non native wildlife should be destroyed. This was just about the time that ecological assessment became a well paid job! Locally many years ago a major road development was stopped for over a year to retrieve around 6 Great-crested Newts at a fee of half a million to the assessors and God knows how many millions lost to the developers.