Squirrels can fly. Well, jump in a most graceful style from one tree to another; and with their lovely, bushy tails acting like a sail or a wing, they are in the nearest thing to flight. These are greys, and appear to be numerous in Meath. Now it is often said that the grey squirrel, introduced to this country only in 1911, drives out the red, the original squirrel. This is the view of Kathleen Barclay Russell of Parteen, Limerick, in a letter. She first encountered a grey squirrel as a child in a park in England. It was very large and bold. It came down from its tree and lolloped towards me. I was very frightened. l thought it must be mad. l waved my arms and shouted and scared it away."
No little red squirrel could stand up to such a fox. "She thinks that the grey squirrel has killed them off," where there are no reds.
But are the reds disappearing? James Fairley, the zoologist, points out that the red is thinly distributed "over most of the country but locally common, and said to have increased in recent years. Because it is shyer than the grey, and therefore not seen as often, and because no systematic work on it has been completed in Ireland - there have been unpublished government studies - its precise status is uncertain."
The grey, he writes, is to be found in only 15 counties: Armagh, Dublin, Fermanagh, Galway, Leitrim, Longford, Kildare, Kilkenny, Meath, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, Tyrone, Westmeath and Wicklow.
This is from the 1984, revised and enlarged edition of An Irish Beast Book. Has the situation changed much since then?
The greys are nearly twice as heavy as the reds, but are as winsome in looks, to many, as the daintiest reds. Fairley hazards a guess that there might he inter-breeding.
Maybe greys have always a tint to their fur, but one or two greys seen in recent years have a distinct russet to red touch in the hairs of their tail. They are tough and tenacious, slowly managing to bite through metal to reach nuts intended for the birds.
Eamon de Buitlear, who sees more of the island than most of us writes in Ireland's wild Countryside that there is little evidence that the reds have suffered from the grey invaders.