You mention not having seen a red squirrel for years and the voices of dissent are raised - there are plenty still around. First in was Sally Walker of Fernhill, Sandyford, south Dublin, whose gardens are very well worth a visit, and she tells of reds skipping among her trees. As late as Saturday last there was the letter from Bray in this newspaper telling of an encounter with one in Convent Avenue there. Oddly, a magpie "tried in vain to catch the squirrel", which disappeared from the writer's sight. And a neighbour of the writer told her how, that same afternoon, a red squirrel had tried to climb in their livingroom window. The same one? Work is being done in the convent grounds and maybe there are more to be disturbed. The correspondent wrote: "Whatever the reason for the appearance, it brightened up an overcast summer day."
And wild animals do, in general, brighten up your day. It is not infrequently that badgers appear in the lawn of a house along the Dodder. And a very young badger, its face or muzzle a picture of surprise and timidity in black and white, does enliven, in this case, the evening. Hedgehogs in this area are now infrequent, but the prize must go, think many, to the experience of meeting otters. Until a few years ago there was a family of them in one of the streams that pour into the Boyne. Watching a mother teach a couple of cubs how to dive after fish was an experience not given to this writer but to someone very close to him. Henry Williamson's Taka the Otter is a masterpiece on this animal - but written in the days when there were still otterhounds in England, and here. The otters vanished from the Boyne tributary, but a friend swears he recently saw one disappear into the reeds - not far from the scene of the experience related above.
To come back to squirrels: the grey is not entirely the baddie he is held out to be. He or she. He does very little of barking of trees, though you need to pick the big cones of the pinus pine before he or she does. Greys disturb birds at feeders, but they survive together. And after many years you decide they are not going to go away and you live with them, even though you would prefer the tiny, cosy and quite beautiful reds.
Colin Williams, Warden of the Dorset Wildlife Reserve on Brownsea Island in that county, writes in Country Life July 6th that Kielder Forest, as reported in that magazine (and mentioned here) is not the last resort of the reds. He has a population of 200 and there are others in England. Y