Tag: Grey Squirrel

The Edge of the Moor

IT’S TOO WET and windy for us to continue up onto the moors after our stop for a flask of coffee on the bench overlooking the River Little Don upstream from Langsett Reservoir so we take the shorter route back to the car park through the plantations. Some of the tall – but shallow-rooted – conifers have recently been blown down.

There’s a flock of between one and two hundred Redwings in one of the pastures sheltered by the top edge of the wood. Amongst them what appears to be a bird with a much paler version of the plumage. I think the term would be leucistic, which means lacking in pigment – the word comes from the Greek leukos meaning white. This one I would describe as a pale biscuit colour.

My sketch is of a normal Redwing from the earlier years of this diary, which explains its dotty quality as in those days I always scanned at 72 rather than 100 dpi and this is a GIF, a compressed image file that uses a limited range of colours. In those days of painfully slow dial-up connections, I could get away with this kind of image when it was viewed on the lower resolution monitors of that time.

A Nibbled Cone

I picked up this nibbled cone by the side of the track. I’m guessing that this is the work of a squirrel rather than a Crossbill, which we’ve seen here in the past. A Crossbill tends to tweak and twist the seeds from between the scales while a squirrel would eat it like a corn-on-the-cob, discarding the core.

We saw several Grey Squirrels on our walk through the woods, including two pairs. At this time of year the males are likely to be trailing around after the females or giving chase.

The Hawk and the Squirrel

Harris HawkWatching a Grey Squirrel carrying bedding to its drey the other day, I was thinking what an easy life these suburban squirrels must have, with no natural enemies apart from the occasional Fox, which can’t follow them up into the tree-tops. But the squirrels of Spring Mill Park must be well aware of one powerful predator that has been hawking around the area for the last 14 years; this North American Harris Hawk, Parabuteo unicinctus, one of three which belong to a local falconer.

grey squirrelHe exercises them regularly but confides to me that it’s now getting a bit too much for him. When the bird goes down on prey it’s not like a retriever dog, it won’t bring the prey back to him, so it might end up half a mile away – as the hawk flies – up the slope in one of the pastures between Spring Mill Park and the motorway.

This hawk can easily tackle prey such as Rabbits and Magpies but if you’re hawking for Grey Squirrels – which, for all their cuteness, are often seen as a pest species, here in Britain where they’ve been introduced – the hawk needs to be equipped with special leg-guards as the squirrel, when caught, can swivel around and use its impressive incisors to bite into the back of the hawk’s legs, potentially inflicting permanent damage.

Flying weight is critical for hawking; fly a bird that’s even a few grams over its ideal weight and it will happily soar about all day without bothering to go for prey. This female Harris Hawk, I’m informed, needs to weigh in at precisely 2 pounds, 1 ounce and 3 grams, when it is taken out to hunt.

goshawkThe falconer was once surprised, when he was calling back one of his hawks, by the sudden appearance of a Goshawk which flew down and perched on the fence nearby. It had jesses so he managed to get near it and take it back to his avairy. The ring, which all captive falcons wear, revealed that it had been lost by a falconer who lives at Addingham, 23 miles to the north-west of Spring Mill, so he was able to reunite the bird with its owner.