The Sheehy Effect - Why Pine Marten 'Rewilding' will allow Red Squirrels to Return to England

It is one of my big ambitions to return red squirrels to all of the UK; non-native North American grey squirrels, introduced at the whim of some aristocratic thinking they look cute to his grounds,  have edged out our native red squirrels to near extinction in England. But it has been noted by many naturalists that red squirrels are present in the same place pine martens exist. Pine martens were wiped out in England by gamekeepers to keep them from their shooting estates, allowing our landowning elite to shoot that other alien invader, the pheasant, bred in their millions still today.

It is rare for reds, pine martens and grey squirrels to co-exist, in fact the return of Pine Martens to central Ireland has spelt doom for the invasive greys and a leap in red squirrel numbers this has been coined the 'Sheehy Effect' after Wildwood's good friend Dr Emma Sheehy who has done so much of the Pine Marten Surveys that have confirmed this hypothesis.  In fact Dr Emma Sheehy is working with Wildwood on more projects to assist her research into this effect.

This example highlights the need to get our ecology back in balance to stop invasive species, but also stop killing off our own species in the wonderfully termed ‘trophic cascade’ as is used by rewinders such as myself or George Monbiot. The scientific research and the conservation community have now been amassing evidence and the Vincent Wildlife Trust have already released pine martens to Wales.

I have been working up plans to restore pine martens and Red Squirrels throughout Southern England at appropriate sites and our plans were documented by the BBC on thier Inside Out programme this week.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beaver, Rewilding & Land Value Tax have the answer to the UK's Flooding Problem.

Image
Interesting the solution to the problems of flooding is the same for many of the problems facing Britain in the economic, housing and environmental crisis: Tax land values. This is because marginal farmland which is only farmed because of enormous taxpayer subsidies, and produces little food, will come out of production and can revert to flood plain and naturally water absorbing wild land - saving us from the flooding My press release on these issues of flooding: Beaver & Rewilding have the answer to the UK's Flooding Problem. _____________________________________________ Peter Smith, Wildwood Trust Chief Executive said: “It took the death of school children in a catastrophic flood event to shock the Dutch authorities to really tackle flooding on the Rhine; one of their answers was to stop farming on flood plain and to create a giant natural wetland, managed by wild horses, to prevent this tragedy from happening again.” _______________________________________________ ...
Read more

Zen and the Art of Land Value Tax

Image
  Or why the green movement has trouble accepting the one policy that will guarantee their objectives.   Land Value Tax (LVT) in its full theory is very complicated and to understand it properly requires a lot of thought and to mechanistically work out how it is fundamental to the protection of nature & natural assets. I myself have been attacked at conferences by well-meaning greens who’s hostility and almost zeal at condemning LVT leaves me depressed and confused as to their thinking. Why such people should have such anger, denial and almost  willful  need not to educate themselves of the economics of environmental destruction needs further investigation.  My best answer for this came from the similarities to the title theme of Robert M. Pirsig's bestselling book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ exploring the ‘Metaphysics of Quality’. Even though LVT is official Green Party Policy, explaining LVT to the leaders of the gree...
Read more

How do we stop the Insect Apocalypse?

Image
There have been a number of articles this week on the insect apocalypse, with some studies showing an 80% drop in insect numbers since the late 90s. These come from the car windshield splatter effect. We now see so few bugs splattered across our windscreen when many of us over 40 in childhood saw  our car windscreen splattered with insects, and every stop our parents had to wipe hundreds of squashed bugs from our windscreens during the summer. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/12/car-splatometer-tests-reveal-huge-decline-number-insects More detailed studies in Germany have identified a 75% decline in flying insect numbers over a 26 year period. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 As regular readers of this blog will know, I am far more interested in practical solutions to ecological problems than in the endless, often misleading debates presented in mainstream media. One of my pet hates is the way these “futile dilemm...
Read more