British Wildlife

@Jenny1234 red squirrel i think?

@Jenny1234 Red Squirrel - the squirrel species native to the British Isles.

(And sadly now very rare, confined to just a few fairly small areas. It was driven out by the imported Grey Squirrel, an American species now recognised as a pest. )

I think the rodent in the last photograph is a vole, not a mouse or rat.

@ArishMell @Jenny1234
Yes red squirrel nearly extinct thanks to the introduction of the grey from the Americas a couple of hundred years ago and the felling of the large forests of England during the time we couldn't build wooden ships fast enough.

@ArishMell last one is a harvest mouse smaller than my thumb

@OldBrit I think the reds are very slowly spreading from the Lake District. I glimpsed one very briefly, near Appleby-in-Westmoreland one day some years ago.

Apart from the red squirrel colony safe on Brownsea Island the only squirrels in Dorset are the greys - but many have noticeably orange tinges to their fur. Might that be from minerals in the pine-seeds that are one of their main foods? Particularly iron, perhaps, as the heathlands in the East of the county are rich in iron-oxide.

I understand pine-martens (another British native) have been introduced in some places as a grey-squirrel control, especially where the reds are trying to cling on to life as well. It seems the reds can retreat to safety on branch ends too flexible to hold the larger grey squirrel or a pine-marten.

@OldBrit Thankyou! Hard to judge scale in the picture, but the muzzle looks more vole than mouse-shaped from that angle.

@ArishMell they talked about pine martens as they were there too with stoats, weasels etc.

Hedgehogs was the most worrying talk. Less than 20 years and they'll be extinct in the wild apparently.

@OldBrit Losing the hedgehog will be terrible. They normally have only one natural predator - the badger - but they are being wiped out by habitat loss and by road deaths.

They are prone to various diseases, and to parasite infestation that can weaken them. Various voluntary rescue groups do their best - I have a friend who helps operate a hedgehog hospital that also occasionally nurses sick birds back to health.

@ArishMell my son and daughter in law are a release site for some from their local hedgehog hospital in Hampshire. But recent fences people are refusing to allow to have gaps in mean they're unlikely to continue. The ones they are releasing are coming back too thin as not enough to eat.

@OldBrit That's bad. Do the fence erectors say why they don't want hedgehogs on their land? It looks as if the releases will have to find new sites.

@ArishMell their house and want to do as they want and want it all perfect blah blah blah

My daughter in law works at DEFRA so is now pushing for a building reg for new builds to have a rule but sadly like the swallow boxes idea the builders will fight back on cost grounds no doubt and it'll just become an advisory status

@OldBrit I see. Very sad when actually, if they want their garden perfect, inviting the hedgehogs in might even help them!

The house-builders are no longer under any effective control anyway, even to enforce technical quality standards.

@ArishMell hedgehogs are so precious. I had one as a pet years ago

@Jenny1234

Saw a sloth that was adopted by a beagle