The war on squirrels

On 2 January 1997, readers of the Los Angeles Times woke up to news of an outbreak of hostilities between Britain and America. “British Wage War on US ‘Invaders’,” screamed the headline in LA’s leading daily.

Yet the invaders weren’t human, they were small and furry. “Imported gray squirrels, reviled as ‘tree rats’, are pushing the native red variety toward extinction,” the article continued. “In scarcely more than a century, gray squirrels, imported from America, have toppled the British red squirrels from the perch of treetop privilege they have enjoyed since the Ice Ages.”

The article, written by the paper’s London bureau chief, William Montalbano, conveyed to its American readers Britons’ love and hate relationship with the nation’s two squirrels, the red and the grey. Yet it did more than that. Montalbano took the clash between the all-conquering grey squirrel and its cuddly red cousin and turned it into a metaphor for the Ugly American: uncouth, greedy, unstoppable, super-sized and altogether unloved.

“Overfed, oversexed and over here. Half a century ago, such good-natured grousing was aimed at American GIs who came to liberate a continent,” Montalbano wrote. “In these high tech times, it is squirrels that rouse the English angst.”

Montalbano wasn’t exaggerating: the grey squirrel had indeed been the source of fire and fury on the other side of the Atlantic. Everyone from gamekeepers to prime ministers had raged at the sight of grey squirrels turning their new British home into their own private playground.

And what made matters worse was the fact that the grey’s rapid proliferation was apparently achieved at the expense of its native red cousin, which, by 1997, was second only to the water vole as Britain’s fastest declining mammal. For decades, those standing up for the defenceless red – and confronting the grey’s other affronts against trees, crops and birds – portrayed their actions as righteous self-defence against a voracious invader. They