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Wonders of the red squirrel
The Eurasian red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris)
↑ All about squirrelsThe real red squirrel
The red squirrel is a small squirrel that lives in trees. Here are three true things about it.
Tufted ears
A red squirrel has a reddish-brown coat, a pale underside and a bushy tail. You can tell it from a grey squirrel by its smaller size, red fur and large ear tufts.
SourceSmall and light
A red squirrel's body is 18 to 24 centimetres long, with a tail of 17 to 18 centimetres. It weighs 100 to 350 grams.
SourceHere since the Ice Age
The red squirrel is the only squirrel native to England. It arrived over a land bridge from the continent at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago.
Source
A red squirrel beside its drey high in a pine
In the drey
A year in a red squirrel's nest
A red squirrel's nest is called a drey. It is a ball of woven twigs, about the size of a football, lined with soft moss, leaves and grass. It usually sits in the fork of a branch, tight against the trunk, around two-thirds of the way up the tree. The breeding season starts with chases in January. In March, three or four babies are born. They are born blind, deaf and hairless, and need their mother for everything. The babies start to explore by their seventh week and stop drinking milk by their tenth. Most young squirrels leave home in the autumn.
SourceSoft food
The squirrels of Formby
Woodland at Formby, in Merseyside, is one of the last places in England where red squirrels live. In the past, people there fed the squirrels peanuts. In the 1990s, one study suggests, as much as 56 per cent of their food came from peanuts alone. Kim Chandler, a PhD student at the University of York, scanned red squirrel skeletons from across Britain, kept at the National Museum of Scotland. The Formby squirrels had differently shaped lower jaws, and signs of smaller chewing muscles, than red squirrels that eat harder nuts and cones. Feeding them is now discouraged.
SourceThe pictures on this page are AI-generated illustrations. The facts are checked against the sources linked.