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On a grey, still November morning in Fox’s Grove, Chris Skinner finally turns his attention to a mammal he has somehow omitted for years — the grey squirrel. One races up an oak as they arrive, and the floor is littered with sweet chestnuts. Chris recalls the red squirrels that still lived here through his childhood in the 1950s and 60s, half the size of the greys, with ear tufts, before they faded away. He explains the multiple introductions from North America from the 1870s onwards (including a wedding-present release at Woburn), the role of squirrel pox, the football-sized drays of twigs and soft grasses in which the females raise two broods of kittens each year, and the heavy damage the animals do by stripping bark from sycamore and young oaks. Foresters nickname them tree rats; an early-20th-century bounty on tails was abandoned after gamekeepers began cutting tails and releasing the animals. Roughly a hundred greys now live on the farm, concentrated in the woods, and none hibernate.
Moving into the open, they walk a dead-straight, 400-metre hedge in Caister Park that Chris believes is about 400 years old. It has not been cut for five years and is heavy with wine-red hawthorn berries (one hard seed inside) and the elongated hips of dog rose, both rich in vitamin C. Ivy berries form the next course in the succession. Chris points out the old layered stems that once made the hedge stock-proof, notes that one new species appears roughly every century, and celebrates the 26 miles of hedges on the farm as vital wildlife corridors linking wood to river. All three British woodpeckers are present; the berries and the fallen fruit at the base feed winter thrushes and the small mammals that in turn support the farm’s owls.
Listener letters bring a pure-white crab spider (Misumena vatia — “hate-filled and bow-legged”) that has ambushed a honeybee, an invitation to vote in the RSPB’s Bird of the Year, a blue tit systematically pecking a wooden lintel (woodworm larvae), and a luminous photograph of an eyed hawk-moth caterpillar.
This episode is a November study of introduced mammals and ancient green corridors — ideal for savouring the contrast between childhood memories of red squirrels, the still-abundant greys, and the quiet bounty of a 400-year-old hedge at High Ash Farm.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432378/episodes/20084149-episode-2-97-tree-rats-and-400-year-hedges.mp3?download=true
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