Editor's note: Across the globe, there are thousands of national parks and protected areas. To look at how other countries manage and protect their parks, and to introduce you to some incredible destinations, the National Parks Traveler occasionally will post a feature from abroad.
In this British landscape of stunning coastline, clear-running rivers, clean air, and ink-black night skies, the once ubiquitous red squirrel has become something of a unicorn.
In one generation, the squirrel has gone from being a woodland creature that most people would be familiar with to one almost impossible to spot in Northumberland National Park and which has been designated a protected species across the United Kingdom.
The national park is the northernmost national park in England. It covers an area of more than 650 square miles from the Scottish border in the north to just south of Hadrian's Wall, ancient Rome’s barrier against barbarism. The park lies entirely within Northumberland, covering about a quarter of the county.
Northern England has one of the most relatively stable populations of red squirrels, thanks largely to the dedication and enthusiasm of groups such as Northern Red Squirrels, which is focused on conservation of the animals.
Hadrians Wall/Johnny Gios
But habitat loss with the clear felling of land has had a negative effect on the squirrels. The decline of broad-leaved deciduous native species like Oak, Beech and Hazel in favour of nonnative, fast-growing conifers being grown commercially is another factor.
All of England’s national parks are managed land, owned and worked by farmers and landowners, including the National Trust. None of the land actually belongs to the National Park Authority. This makes protecting native species a balancing act between those who make a living from farming, commercial forestry, or breeding grouse and pheasant for shooting on moorland, and those wishing to conserve native wildlife.
The landscape of Northumberland National Park includes mixed grassland and moorland, alongside farmland for cattle and sheep with some arable farming. Keilder, England’s largest forest, as well as the Otterburn military training area which is within the boundaries of the park and takes up 32,000 acres — a huge area of the park.
Predation also has had devastating effects. With no apex predators left, the middle predators have multiplied. Foxes, badgers, and crows are the main ones. Otters are also thriving now with the improved water quality in the rivers and eradication of the mink. All prey on smaller mammals and birds. And climate change has led to milder wet winters easier for the predators to survive.
Arrival of the grey squirrel also is a major factor in the decline of the red squirrel population. These North American imports, which first arrived in the 1870s as an “ornamental species,” are more vigorous competitors for food and habitat. They also carry both squirrel pox and staphylococcus that can be deadly to the reds. Humane population control of the greys is not opposed by the national park, but it can be controversial with the public.
Ian Glendinning is working to reverse the decline of red squirrels, once thought to number about 3.5 million across the United Kingdom but now numbering around 290,000, according to the Mammal Society. Only about 29,500 are thought to reside in England.
Glendinning is the chair of Northern Red Squirrels, which represents about two dozen red squirrel groups working to conserve the animals in the North of England.
Supplementary feeding in the summer can help pockets of population because their main food source of nuts isn’t ready until the autumn. Pine nuts make up a large part of red squirrels’ wild diet, but they also eat many seeds and other nuts, depending on availability. Their diet also includes fungi, green shoots, dried fruits and berries. They may also chew on bones and deer antlers as a good source of calcium. But they can struggle to find food during the summer when nuts, fruits, and seeds aren’t ripe.
“Red squirrels love hazelnuts. I bought a $4,000 bag of them last year to feed them over the summer season when they are breeding,” said Glendinning.
The Newcastle man sees red squirrels daily but is reluctant to reveal their whereabouts. He is aided by his two squirrel-sniffing dogs, Spike, a German shepherd, and Jock, a ‘psychotic’ black Labrador.
“I have to be more secretive than MI5!," Glendinning said, referring to Great Britain’s spy organization. “I don’t want social media photographers turning up and enticing them with food to pose sitting in shopping trolleys and the like.
“Red squirrels are undoubtedly very cute and easy to tame and people do love to interact with them,” he went on. “But feeding them peanuts can poison them and enticing them with food attracts rats and in turn the greys, leading to the demise of the reds.”
The decline in the red squirrels’ population has been devastating.
“If there was a healthy population these factors wouldn’t be a problem, but they are so rare that every one that dies is a bitter blow,” said Glendinning. “We need more education to make people aware of how we can help them.”
Calling Time On The Curlew
Also in a precarious position in Northumberland National Park are curlews, a shorebird that is the symbol of the national park and so occupies a special place in this fragile ecosystem. Nearly 60 percent of the curlew population has been lost in the last 25 years across England and Scotland and the North of England is home to most of the remaining population.
Intensive farming methods have changed the landscape to more of a monoculture with fewer hedgerows and less variety of grassland. Previously, it was a mosaic of different types of landscape with both long and short grassy areas and wetlands that curlews favour.
Ian Cole is working to preserve curlews, the icon of Northumberland National Park/Ian Robert Cole
Ian Robert Cole is the Curlew LIFE project officer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This is a four-year project funded by the European Union to work with farmers along Hadrian’s Wall to preserve the curlew. Cole’s project works with 25 farms along the iconic wall to try and protect the optimum breeding habitat for curlews.
One method they employ is the use of electric fencing around the nests. But it doesn’t always guarantee results.
“Even though electric fencing allowed 26 eggs to hatch, only eight [chicks] remain now due to predation from gulls, stoats, crows, foxes and badgers,” said Cole. “One chick was even found to be infested with ticks. It’s heartbreaking.”
Happily, people do feel strongly about saving the curlew and have been galvanised by the project.
“Faces light up when they come to our education sessions,” he explained. “The first thing we do is play the call of the curlew. They remember the days of their youth when this amazing sound was heard on many a morning.”
According to Cole, some farmers are more invested in protecting curlews than others. “Harvests for silage coincide with newly hatching chicks, when if they could just postpone the cut for a couple of weeks, the chicks would have fledged and be able to fly out of the field,” he said.
“We have to remember that all our national parks in the UK are managed land and nowhere in the UK is a truly wild landscape,” Cole said. “Predator control is an important tool. Land was historically managed by game keepers and farmers monitoring predators like crows, gulls, foxes and badgers."
Gill Thompson, an ecologist who works for the national park, acknowledges that improving things for endangered species is all about partnerships between landowners and farmers.
“Interestingly the area around Hadrian’s Wall was recently in the news after the iconic Sycamore tree — as seen in Kevin Costner’s film Robin Hood — was illegally felled,” she said. “This tree was close to a boggy area which the curlews like and there are quite a few in that area.”
The Future Of Our Native Species
Great efforts are being made within the park to try and preserve these special animals. All our lives are diminished by the reduction in biodiversity in the UK. If we let nature take its course we will lose much of our remaining wildlife to extinction.
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