OK, yeah, thank you for that introduction. My name is Molly Frost, and I am the red squirrel officer for the Lancashire Wildlife Trust. So today, obviously, I'm going to be talking about red squirrel conservation, but I'm going to be talking about it in the context of disease, and conservation dogs, and a little bit about fertility control as well.
But first of all, I just wanted to introduce you to my team. And as you can see, this won't take very long. So to start off with, we've got Rachel.
She is my line manager, and Rachel actually used to be the red squirrel officer. So she has been heavily involved in the project. But now she is the senior conservation officer.
So she oversees the kind of management of the conservation in the Merseyside area. And then you've got me. I'm Mommy.
I'm the red squirrel officer. So I oversee the day to day running of the red squirrel projects, and that's everything from grey squirrel control to social media. It is a very big job.
And then after that, we have a contractor who's on our team. And as you can see by the little key, we don't always have a contractor. It is subject to funding, meaning that that doesn't come from the core wildlife Trust fund.
We do have to fundraise to to get money for him. At the moment, we do have Him until about September time this year, which is great. And then obviously, I couldn't talk about conservation without talking about volunteers.
Volunteers are integral to every conservation project. And so we have a number of volunteers on our team to help out with great grow control, monitoring and events. And so this is our area.
I'm not sure how familiar people are with North Merseyside and West Lancashire, but this is the area that we work in. This purple line is what we call our stronghold. Ideally, we'd want to work beyond the stronghold, but you've seen my team, we're not very big, and this is enough for us to be getting on with for now.
And so the the area that's in red, that's form B and just above that we've got Ada. That's what we call our reserve area. And that's the area that you're going to see the the majority of the red squirrels in Lancashire and Merseyside.
Then we've got Crosby and just down there, which is North Merseyside and then the project goes all the way up to Southport, which is in West Lancashire. And for those of you that know me soundswood, that little orange blob at the side is soundswood. And so within this area, we, we do kind of three main things, and that's great squirrel control, squirrel monitoring and education and engagement.
So all three of these kind of link me on to my first topic, which is disease. I'm so sorry, I probably should have had a warning, but you're all vets. It's fine.
You're used to seeing stuff like this. Squirrels have 3 main diseases that kind of threaten their population, 3 main ones that we tend to talk about in red squirrel conservation, and they are squirrel pox, leprosy, and adenovirus. So the first one, squirrel pox, that's the big one.
That's the one that gets all of the limelight, all of the research thrown at it. And it's the one that our project has suffered with the most as far as we're aware, anyway. It's a really nasty disease to get.
Squirrels will have scabs and lesions and weeping around the eyes, mouth, feet and genitals. And one of the really obvious signs, so whenever I get members of the public that ring me and say, oh, I think there's a sick red squirrel. My garden, one of the first signs is scratching at the eyes.
So that's a bit of weird behaviour for a squirrel to be doing. And that tends to be the first symptom, even if they haven't got all of this nastiness going on, is scratching at their eyes, and so we kind of monitor the situation from there. A little bit of research was done that says on average, 2/3 of great squirrels carry squirrel pox and in some areas this can be up to 90%, which is astronomical.
Great squirrels are asymptomatic reservoir hosts for squirrel pox. I'm sure you all know what that means. It means that they have the virus.
It doesn't affect them, but they can pass it on to red squirrels. And unfortunately, it is fatal to red squirrels, as Kate has seen many times, they come into the vets and there's just no hope for them. They die quite quickly, and it's really, really nasty.
So moving on to leprosy, we don't see a great deal of leprosy in our area. Now I say that, however, this squirrel that is pictured at the top here is a bit of a question mark squirrel. I'm not quite sure what was going on with it.
And on first look, it looks quite typical of squirrel poxx symptoms, but there are a few things that kind of pointed us in the direction that there might be something else going on. The first one is, if you kind of have a look at its arms, it's losing a bit of its hair around there, which is quite typical of leprosy to the hair loss. And with squirrel pox, we wouldn't really see that as much around the arms and across the back if you were to see the rest of the squirrel.
And then also the behaviour. So when squirrel pox really takes hold and they are as symptomatic as this looks, they get very lethargic. They can barely hold their heads up, and it's really obvious they're really easy for us to go and contain because they don't move a lot.
This squirrel I dealt with personally. And it took 3 of us to try and contain this squirrel, me and 2 fully grown men chasing it down the streets because it was darting under cars, running across fences, jumping over things, which for it to be that symptomatic just wasn't what we were expecting for a squirrel poxx case with Leprosy, they can live for the disease for quite a long time, and it doesn't tend to affect their behaviour as much as squirrel poxx. I can't give you any answers.
It's still a question mark squirrel. It's currently waiting to be assessed by the APHA. So hopefully we will have some more conclusive results soon.
And then finally, we've got adenovirus. So adenovirus is the one that we know the least about. It's the least researched.
And unfortunately for us, there are no obvious outward symptoms, so it's really hard for us to track with squirrelpox and leprosy, it's really obvious that a squirrel is unwell because you can see it. Members of the public will pick up their phone and say, it looks weird. Can you come and have a look at it?
With adenovirus, it's all internal. So it causes lesions in the digestive system with diarrhoea and intestinal bleeding, which that's something that a member of the public might not be able to see. And interestingly, the spleen is considered the optical matrix for detecting asymptomatic adenovirus infections.
So for us to be conclusive that it is a virus, we have to do postmortems and take tissue samples from the spleen. So it's a little bit trickier than the other two, which are a little bit more obvious. And so going back to squirrel pox, and this is a case here of squirrel pox.
You can see it's not very happy squirrel, unfortunately. And we as a project have seen the impacts of squirrel pox and unfortunately, it has affected our population quite dramatically. So the graph that you can see here, I apologise.
I didn't actually title it. This is our monitoring. So we do biannual monitoring in the spring and the autumn every Yeah.
And that gives us an indication as to what's happening in the population of red squirrels. We've been doing this since 2002, so we do have quite a bit of data, not as historical as we probably would like, but we've got an idea of kind of the trends that happen. Back in 2008 when we started to see lots and lots of squirrel cases coming through, as you can see, that was reflected in the data and the population plummeted.
We lost almost, well over 80% of the reserve population, which that's dreadful. You know, if that was to happen again, we, we don't know what what would happen. As you can see over the years we've gradually started to claw them back, but it's now causing fluctuations in our population.
And we don't know what's going to happen. Unfortunately, this this this goes up to autumn 2022. Spring's not looking great.
It's it's going down again. And squirrel boxes in the environment now. It's in the population that we have.
So squirrels red squirrels can pass it between each other. There's no vaccine, so what we have to do is just really keep on top of that monitoring to try and remove sick squirrels when we do see them. .
As as a scientists and people that really enjoy data and looking at pretty graphs like this, sorry that video was supposed to go, so you can't really read that. We often forget about the emotional toll that things like this take on people like myself that work in conservation, vets that unfortunately do have to take these animals in and euthanize them, and members of the public and volunteers. You know, I, as a conservationist, I deal with people on a daily basis and people bring me to see, to tell me that a squirrel has come into their garden that's sick.
And I've had people crying down the phone to me, and you know, I have to stay strong and say, don't worry, we can, we can fix this. But it is devastating and it's draining. You know, I've not been working in red squirrel conservation that long comparatively to a lot of our volunteers, but we've got volunteers that have been working with us for over 20 years.
And to see a graph like this and to see these constant effects, it does take a toll on their mental health and does kind of not give them the hope that we would want to give them. OK, so moving on to the next bit, we back in 2016, started a project called Red Squirrels United. And so this was a UK landscape scale grace r management programme.
And that was between 4 different areas of the UK. And so you can see our little circled area of Lancashire and Merseyside. We had Wales, Northern Ireland and Northumberland.
And during this period of time, there was a study that was done to have a look at grey squirrels in particular, and how many of them were carrying both squirrel pox and adenvirus. And so we gave samples of our cold squirrels from that area. You can kind of just see our little blobs in there of the different areas that we took samples from.
And we had a mixture of male, female, adult and juvenile just to get a good range of the population. And we gave 257 over the course of those 3 years. I just wanted to highlight the adenovirus results cos I've already spoken about squirrel pox.
We kind of know what impact that's having. But as I mentioned before, Adenovirus is really tricky. There's not a lot of research on it.
It doesn't show those really obvious outward symptoms, so we don't really know what an impact it's having on our red squirrel population. And I mean, the results are a little bit scary to look at. Quite a vast majority of the great squirrels that were sampled were positive for denna virus.
So that is something as a project, as red squirrel conservationists that we really do need to think about. And moving forward, it's something that we need to try and come up with a solution or a way of monitoring this to understand what effect this might be having on the red squirrel population. OK, I'm gonna move on to something a little bit happier now because that was a really depressing way to start a presentation.
So the next thing we're gonna be talking about is dogs, everyone's favourite topic. Now I can't take credit for this. If Rachel was here, she would be doing this bit because this is Rachel's project and what she's been doing for a number of years.
But dogs are being used in conservation and ecology more widely now. You know, detection dogs aren't a new thing, they've been used . Various different industries for a long time.
But conservationists and ecologists and design to wake up to how useful they can be to our lives. And they can provide a whole host of different services to us from carcass detection to disease detection. And dogs have certain qualities that humans do not.
So physical qualities such as, you know, up to 3 million scent receptors in their nose. They see the world through through their nose. Humans, most of us navigate the world through sights, and although we do that, we're not very perceptive.
We can quite easily walk past past things. You know, if I was out looking for a squirrel, I could easily walk past it and not being a very perceptive person. They have the ability to cover large areas, get through rough and inaccessible terrain, and also do that in a less disturbing way.
So if we were to go and see a scrubby area of undergrowth to try and find a dead squirrel, we'd have to be chopping it up and moving things out of the way, whereas dogs can get through, you know, they can get there in with a little bit more minimal disturbance. Unfortunately, animals don't die in convenient locations. So a lot of the time, carcass recovery is quite minimal because we can't find them.
So this is where dogs can be very useful. And probably the most important part is if you have ever met a dog, or have ever met a working dog, they have very high drive. They don't give up easily.
Humans, we could probably go out searching for a red squirrel and after 20 minutes go, oh, my feet hurt, I'm tired and bored. I can't find it. Dogs won't do that.
They have excellent work ethic, which is very useful to have on your team. So here's a video. So these are Rachel's dogs.
Ignore Reed. He's the spaniel that's running around, and we're just looking at Max, the shepherd dog in the background. He's looking for a red squirrel, and he's indicating to Rachel here that he's found one, his tail's wagging.
He's looking at her and he's about to go down and he did go down on the ground to show her, so he found a red squirrel. So yeah, this is Max. He was the first dog that Rachel trained in squirrel detection.
And I just wanted to highlight one of the case studies that Max did back in 2020. And so he surveyed 2 kilometres of coastal woodland up in Bangor. And he found clumps of red squirrel hair and a tail, which again, to highlight that humans would probably walk past that and not see it.
But this find was very, very useful because the the hair samples were taken to the APHA for analysis. And although they didn't detect adenovirus, which they previously knew was in the area, they did detect squirrel pox and they didn't know that squirrel pox was in that area. They weren't really sure what was happening with it.
So the fact that Max found this bit of a squirrel, but it tested positive for squirrel pox was really important for that project to know conclusively that squirrel pox has been in that area and affecting their red squirrels. So hold on, Max. And then I just wanted to talk about a dissertation project that a student did for us a couple of years ago.
They wanted to essentially compare humans to to search dogs to see whether they are as effective as everybody says they are. And so accuracy was the number of successful searches, so if they physically did find what they were looking for. There were two teams.
There was Max with Rachel. They were team number 1. The other team was for humans.
Max was looking for an actual red squirrel. The humans didn't have to do that. They had a stuffed red squirrel that they could find, which is a little bit nicer for them.
And Max's team were 93% accurate in searching for squirrels compared to the team of 4 humans which were only 77% accurate. So just goes to show that, you know, Max is much more effective in searching and he was also more cost effective, which working in conservation is music to my ears, hearing the words cost effective because we don't have a lot of money that comes in, so any ways that we can save money and have a dock on our teams is excellent. So just to kind of wrap up with Max, this is another one of his finds, and I just wanted to show this because in areas of open woodland, you might think it might be quite easy to find a red squirrel, but in areas of open woodland, there are still areas of cover, and this particular red squirrel was found in a covered area.
We might have easily walked past that. If we were to go and try and find it, we would have had to move things out of the way. But Max can pick up a scent from 20 to 30 metres away.
So, I mean, I can't even see that red squirrel now on the big screen. So it would have taken us a lot longer to be able to find that, but Max could hone in from about 30 metres away and go straight to it, which is excellent. So stopping the spread of disease.
If anybody has any tips, please speak to me at the end, because I'm always looking for ways to help with this. And as a project and as red squirrel conservation in general, the things that we do to try and stop the spread of disease is get members of the public to report their sightings of grey squirrels and sick red squirrels immediately. They see a lovely healthy red squirrel, we'd want to know about it, but if it's sick, we want to know about it immediately, and if it's a grey squirrel again in an area where there are reds, we want to know about that immediately.
And that's so that we can act straight away. We can remove those grey squirrels, and we can speak to the member of the public. They might want to have a trap in their garden to remove it.
And if it's a sick red squirrel, we need to make sure that we know where that is. We can go out, we can try and contain it. Unfortunately, most of the time they get taken to the vets to be euthanized, but at least they're not kind of passing it around to the rest of the the other healthy red squirrels in the area.
We then also need to advise that member of the community on what to do next.se doesn't stop at the animal. Unfortunately, it does spread by other means.
So with squirrelpox in particular, that is spread through saliva. So if members of the public have shared feeders in their their garden that might be used by birds or used by squirrels. And if they've got water bowls that will just harbour disease and healthy red squirrels can go and a lot of the time they'll probably go and unfortunately be infected.
In some cases we might need to remove feeders entirely. So that might not be just because of disease risk, that might be because a red a grey squirrel has come in and grey squirrels already have a competitive advantage over red squirrels in woodland, you know, they outcompete them for food. So if members of the public are supplementary feeding and grey squirrels are gaining the benefits of that, it's just going to give them another competitive advantage over them.
And they're already being displaced from these woodlands through that competitive exclusion. So we want to try and prevent that. Caveat is, how do you convince a whole community to do this?
You know, it's all well and good, one or two eager people doing it, but we need everybody to be doing it for it to be effective, especially when it comes to removing feeders, members of the public, you know, they, they want to help. They want to feed animals. They want to be helping wildlife.
But sometimes the best thing they can do is do nothing. And that's quite a difficult thing to get across to people. The key is education.
We need to be doing education constantly, and it's not good enough to just shove a leaflet through that door once every 5 years. We need to make sure that we keep on top of that education and reminding people what they can do to help our red squirrels. OK, so the next part is fertility control.
So for those of you that kind of don't know a lot about how we currently have to control grey squirrels, unfortunately, the method that we have to do at the moment is lethal. It's the only way that we can remove grey squirrels. Previously, people could live capture them and move them to a different area to release them.
Not only is that futile because they can walk back. It it's also illegal now, so it is illegal to release a grey squirrel, they, if it has been captured, they, they do have to be culled. However, quite a lot of people don't like the idea of that, funnily enough, people tend to, Quite like the animals in their garden, and especially we live in a country that doesn't have a lot of big charismatic mammals.
You know, we see lots of bears in the garden, birds are wonderful. But unfortunately, due to their excellent ability to invade, grey squirrels are often the only mammal that people see in their day to day lives. And we're quite connected to mammals being mammals ourselves.
So you know, if we go knocking on Mrs. Smith's door and saying, oh, we can shoot that grey squirrel for you if you want, it's, it's quite difficult to to get that across. Obviously, we've got the people that are very keen to do that, but for the majority of the population, they don't want to.
So this is where fertility control comes in. Fertility control can hopefully just shed a bit of light and Help us with our fights to protect red squirrels. At the moment, however, it's not ready.
So probably a lot of you might have heard of the squirrel contraceptive on a slow news day, normally a newspaper will pick it up and start banging on about squirrel contraceptives and how great they are, and then we get flooded with people saying, why, why aren't you using a contraceptive? The reality is it's not ready. So it's a four phase process.
At the moment, I keep saying we, I'm not doing this, royal we. They are currently in the research and development phase. So this has been a 5 year study.
They are in that final year at the moment. They have developed a contraceptive, which is wonderful. It's a contraceptive vaccine, so it doesn't work in the same way that our contraceptives do.
It does create antibodies to cause that infertility. So that phase will be ending in January 2024. After that, we then need to move on to the landscape scale trials, .
The contraceptive is mammal specific, and it is an oral contraceptive, so I'm sure all of you can see the issues that might arise with having that out in feeders. We need to make sure that we are not. You know, giving fertility control to all of the mammals in the area.
We need to make sure that is targeted at grey squirrels, particularly because some of the most vulnerable species that might be living alongside them are things like red squirrels and pine martins that we definitely don't want to be giving fertility control to. So you can see this trial feeder at the bottom there. So they put it up on stilts to try and eliminate some of the mammals that will be on the floor that might get to it.
The thing that they have decided to do is have the feeder with a closed door on it and scales at the front. So the animal walks on, gets weighed by these scales. If it is in the correct weight category for a grey squirrel, the door will open, it can go in, eat its hazelnut paste with a contraceptive in it, and then leave.
And if it's not in the correct category, the door will stay closed. Now, obviously, this does mean that we're not going to be able to target every single grey squirrel in the area. As adults, grey squirrels are about twice the size of red squirrels, and that does mean a juvenile grey is probably weighing about the same as an adult red, so we won't be able to get some of those younger ones, but they'll grow, and that's fine, and they'll get heavier.
But that's kind of the best way that we can think of that will be the least labour intensive to rolling out this contraceptive. Then obviously it needs to be tested for registration by the government to make sure that it's understand what we're doing. And then finally, widespread availability so that people can start using this.
And so I just wanted to highlight some research that was being done alongside the actual development of the contraceptive. Because you know, we need to make sure that contraceptive is going to work and is going to be viable in conservation. So the APHA have done a study looking at the kind of modelling eradication based on current methods of lethal control and adding that fertility control onto it.
Now what is Kind of important to realise about fertility control for it to be effective is that they do need to have one year of culling prior. Sorry. Got bored of me.
There we go. They need to have one year of coming prior to the fertility control for it to be completely effective. However, what these models have shown is that both scenarios get to eradication at the same time.
Now you might be thinking, what's the point in that? You want it to be quicker. But this was a model that was very hypothetical and in an ideal world.
The reality is we're not getting anywhere with culling because people don't like it and we need to be moving forward and making things a little bit more realistic, and fertility control can do that for us. It can make us make it a little bit more realistic. And again, cost effective, my favourite phrase in the world.
Fertility control is more cost effective. Culling's really expensive. You saw from our, our team structure that we have, we have to pay somebody to help us with with grey squirrel control because having volunteers alone isn't enough.
And so hopefully the fertility control can help us with that. And De their behavioural insights team have done a little bit of social science just to see kind of what vibe people are feeling towards the different methods. And in a 3000 participant study, they found that fertility control was the most popular method as we kind of predicted, but that's good to know.
Only 4% would interfere with a fertility control feeder. But 56% of those people would install a feeder themselves. I guarantee if we were to do this study using lethal control, we would not get that figure of 56% of people wanting to do that on their land or in their back garden.
So that's that's really exciting that we kind of have. At this stage, have that backing. And you know, the further we go on, the more education we do, hopefully that will grow.
OK, just to wrap up, I'm going to do a very shameless plug about some research I'm going to be doing in the future. So in October, I'm going to be starting a PhD at the University of York called Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service impacts of grey squirrels in current and future treescapes. And so the stuff I've talked about today, I'm the red squirrel officer.
I talk about red squirrels. That's my job. .
You know, we know the impacts that grey squirrels are having on red squirrels. We know a little bit about the impacts they're having on trees as well. But the wider ecosystem is a bit of an unknown, and we know that they must be having some kind of impact on the wider ecosystem.
There's a bit of anecdotal evidence that they're affecting our songbird population, but no conclusive research has been done. This research is really important to do, as a conservationist who talks to people regularly about this stuff, no matter how much science you throw at people and try and explain things, for a lot of people, removing one squirrel to save another. They don't understand squirrels, a squirrel.
They what's native, what's invasive doesn't matter. A squirrel is a squirrel. However, if we start to kind of demonstrate.
The wider impacts that raceros are having on our ecosystem as a whole, that's a much stronger argument, you know, especially as we're starting to develop some really exciting new methods, we need to get the ball rolling with with people being on board with this. So hopefully that's the research I will do. Wish me luck.
And if you do want to chat about anything that I've spoken about today, I'll be around for the rest of the day, but thank you very much for chatting to me. He.