More than 100,000 live in Scottish pine forests, but the last major English outposts are in Cumbria, Merseyside, Northumberland and Yorkshire. This is where new reserves of isolated coniferous woodland will be protected by exclusion zones three miles wide. Oak, beech and other grey-friendly broadleaf trees will not be allowed to grow in these zones. But this is also a native, indigenous species that will disappear within 10 or 20 years if nothing is done.”Well, it is our fault. Reds frolicked happily in the forests of England undisturbed (more or less) until one dread day in 1876 when a Victorian landowner thought it would be a jolly wheeze to import a couple of those unusual greys from North America.

The guilty man can now be named as Thomas Emmet Brocklehurst of Henbury Park in Cheshire. A time traveller with a shotgun could save a lot of trouble.By the 1930s there were so many greys that the government agreed they were a pest A bounty of threepence a tail was offered after the war. A series of efforts was made over following decades to stop the grey invasion, but none worked.There are three small enclaves of red squirrels in the South: Thetford Forest in Norfolk, where experts have all but given up hope for the reds; on Brownsea Island in Poole harbour; and on the Isle of Wight, both of which are protected by water. Cuddly? With those claws and teeth? “Well, yes, I wouldn’t dare pick one up. But they do come and take nuts out of your hand.”The appeal of the red to Mr Clegg seems to be a mixture of its cuteness, his nostalgia for childhood and an anthropomorphic patriotism “I was brought up with Potter and Squirrel Nutkin. While guests tuck in to a full English, the squirrels nibble peanuts and sunflower seeds. “People are amazed at being so close to such a cuddly creature,” says Mr Clegg.

Any grey caught on red territory will be shot or caught in a trap, jostled into a sack and struck by a fatal blow to the back of the head.
Reds used to be everywhere, but now there are only about 20,000 in England, holed up and fighting for their lives, while there are more than two million greys. Early in the morning they run down from the tall pine trees of the Kielder forest in Northumberland, one of the newly designated reservations, to visit the stone cottage where Don and his wife Sylvia give bed and breakfast. That kind of cynicism does not go down well with Don Clegg, who loves red squirrels with a passion. This is a bloody conflict charged with romance, hatred and a whiff of racism Reds versus greys Small versus big Natives versus invaders The English versus the alien One kind of tree rat versus another kind of tree rat.Sorry. And Professor Ronald Neilson, of Oregon State University, added: “The oceans are generally warming up and there are all sorts of signs that something strange is afoot.”. Imagine the tiger vanishing from India, or the giant panda disappearing from China.

The red squirrel has the same iconic status in England, say those who want to save it. Losing the small, tufty creature that inspired Beatrix Potter to invent Squirrel Nutkin would diminish the soul of the nation, they say, as well as being an ecological disaster. So £1m is to be spent on establishing animal apartheid at 16 reserves across the North, where reds will live without threat from the mortal enemy that has driven them to the brink of extinction in this country: the North American grey squirrel. A Canadian Government report noted that ocean temperatures off British Colombia reached record levels last year as well, blaming “general warming of global lands and oceans”. There were up to 80 times more dead Brandt’s cormorants, a fishing bird, than in previous years.Tests showed the birds died of starvation. “They are not finding enough food, and so they use up the energy stored in their muscles, liver and body fat,” said Hannah Nevins, who investigated similar mass deaths in Monterey Bay.Many fear the ecological collapse is a portent of things to come, as the world heats up.

Water temperatures soared to 7C above normal, which delighted bathers but caused the whole delicate system to collapse. The amount of phytoplankton crashed to a quarter of its usual level.”In 50 years this has never happened,” said Bill Peterson, an oceanographer with the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, in Newport, Oregon.Record numbers of dead seabirds soon washed up on beaches along the coast. These are eaten by zooplankton, tiny animals that in turn feed fish, seabirds and marine mammals.But this year the winds were extraordinarily weak and the cold water did not well up in spring as usual. Normally, winds blow south along the coast in spring and summer, pushing warmer surface waters away from the shore and allowing colder water that is rich in nutrients to well up from the sea bottom, feeding the microscopic plants called phytoplankton.