FYI: Saving red squirrels from extinction

There used to be around three and a half million red squirrels in the UK, but they're now one of our most endangered animals, and they've been pushed to the brink by grey squirrels, which were introduced to the UK by humans in the 1870s. I've come to the Loch of the Lows Nature Reserve north of Edinburgh, where a unique project is managing to stop the decline. Katie from the charity Saving Scotland's Red Squirrels can explain more. The reason that grey squirrels are so impactful is because they out-compete red squirrels for food and for habitat, which means that for red squirrels, it becomes really difficult for them to survive in a place where there are grey squirrels as well. Also, the other issue is that grey squirrels carry a virus. It's called squirrelpox virus, and they're not affected, and they can live with it, and it's totally fine, but it's absolutely deadly to red squirrels. So how do you protect the reds from the greys then? Well, at the moment, the only effective way is to control the grey squirrels, and that means taking them out of the environment and humanely killing them. A lot of our viewers might find it hard to kind of understand and consider how that could be all right. You know, we're trying to protect the natural world, but we're killing, you know, squirrels. How does that work? We don't take the decision lightly at all. It's all part of the issue of invasive species, and grey squirrels are part of that issue. So we know that what we're doing is for the betterment of biodiversity and native species. The team aim to keep the grey squirrels out of this area as much as possible, and to monitor if this is working, rangers like Jen use a simple but clever way to keep track of the numbers. So we have these feeder boxes, and they have a sticky hair trap inside. So when the squirrel comes to the box, it lifts the lid up here, and as it's feeding, it will leave a little bit of hair on this sticky hair, and we can take that away and see whether it's red hair, grey hair, or pine marten hair. The hairs are really tiny, so they study them under a microscope to work out who they belong to. We can see lots of red hair. So that's what we want to see. That is definitely what we want to see. If we did see grey squirrel hair, what would you do next? We'd put a camera trap out, see if we can get the grey on camera. If we have got a regular grey, we would come and put a trap run out. It just goes to show, sometimes conservation isn't simple. But one thing is certain, without the work that the team are doing, red squirrels would disappear from even more of the UK.