I've Seen a Ghost...

About 50 years ago, when I was a feral 10 year-old growing up in the Sussex countryside, I was mooching through the reed beds at the head of Fishbourne Creek in Chichester harbour at dusk when a large brown bird rose up in front of me and flapped slowly above my head, transfixing me with a penetrating stare of its raptorial eyes. I knew instantly what it was - a marsh harrier - because I'd spent hours scrutinising the pictures in P.A.D. Hollom's Popular Handbook of British Birds in the library - and had the usually schoolboy obsession with rarities. Trouble was, no one would believe me. In those days marsh harriers were rarer than they are today, especially in that part of Britain (where there were, then, some ruthless gamekeepers that shot everything with a hooked beak and proudly hung it all on a gibbet) so all the wildlife 'experts' that I mentioned it to gave me a condescending smile and told me I must have got it wrong. I even began to wonder whether I'd imagined the encounter... but I knew what I'd seen.

I'm sorry to admit, to my shame, that I lapsed into 'wildlife expert' mode a couple of days ago. We were walking up a little valley near St. John's Chapel in Weardale when my wife, who was about ten yards ahead of me, turned and said "Look! A red squirrel". 

Now the last time I saw a red squirrel in the middle section of Weardale must have been about twenty years ago and - apart from a small population right up at the head of the dale, at Killhope (see pictures and post here) - it seems to be generally agreed that they are extinct here.

So my instant reaction was a dismissive "No, it can't be. They're long gone. Must be a grey squirrel with a  tinge of brown fur".

But it was indeed a red squirrel. A ghost from the past - except that it was as large and life and scolding us as it raced from the ground up the trunk of a larch tree. 

So I had to apologise for my shameful scepticism pretty quickly. It reminded me of why I've never like the term 'expert', which all-too-often equates with 'know-all".

Anyway, having got that admission off my chest, isn't this a lovely animal?

As we watched it leap from tree to tree it sent down a shower of golden larch needles every time it landed on a branch.

These are big enlargements of small sections of the whole image,so the quality isn't great, but who cares!

Magnificent ear tufts...

The big question, of course, is where did this animal come from? It's very unlikely that it made it down the dale from the distant population at Killhope - most of the intervening territory is open moorland. There are a lot of predators that could catch and kill it in the open (at one point on Sunday we watched eight buzzards soaring overhead). 

This larch plantation is too small to support a red squirrel population all year-round, but there is another much larger conifer plantation about a mile away, that might conceivably shelter a relict population.

Or maybe this is the result of someone's freelance red squirrel reintroduction programme?

There are no answers at the moment but it was a magical - and, I have to admit - humbling encounter.