Here’s a quick guide to the dos and don’ts of feeding red squirrels in your garden produced by the Solway Forests Red Squirrel Network & SSRS: see here.
Here are a range of documents produced by SOS Berwick Group:
- Advice helping reds in your garden including a great list of shrubs and trees that provide food for them: SOSBG Garden RS advice
- Hair tubes are cheaper and easier to transport in numbers, making them good for exploratory surveys in new places: SOSBG Feeder-box & Hair-tube Designs
- A quick id guide for reds and greys: SOSBG red grey id & dreys
- Some feeding signs pictures: SOSBG feeding signs
- Squirrelpox advice: SOSBG Squirrelpox info
- How to determine a map reference correctly! SOSBG Ordnance Survey map referencing
Here is the report on the 2018 SSRS Spring Survey of squirrel distribution both north and south of the central belt. Reds are holding their own in South Scotland, but greys now occupy twice as many survey sites as they did at the start in 2013: SSRS-SQUIRREL-SURVEY-2018_updated
SSRS has produced a slideshow giving advice on how to identify squirrel and pine marten hairs left on stickies in tubes or under feeder lids: SSRS squirrel hair analysis_RAS_18_SC edit 2019
SSRS/Gatehouse Squirrel Group advice on how to get a red squirrel carcase to Edinburgh Vet School for post mortem examination to detect evidence of squirrelpox and other diseases. DO NOT submit any grey squirrel carcases, as there are no funds available to process them at present: SSRS RS Post Mortem advice
Gatehouse Group runs a monthly garden survey to see how dependent reds are on the food we provide via squirrel and/or bird feeders: Garden Survey Brief. Here is a ready made spreadsheet for recording and plotting the data: Garden Survey Form.
For a really readable and comprehensive text about red squirrel behaviour and ecology, along with advice on how you can help to conserve them, look no further than Craig Shuttleworth and Liz Halliwell’s excellent Red Squirrels in my Garden.