![]() Baby season stretches December to February and again from June to August. Grey Squirrels mate twice per year and often make your attic their home base during their baby season. When the cold weather and/or mating season hits, however, squirrels can become somewhat of an unsuspecting enemy. Squirrels do have another side to them…one that homeowners don’t particularly like! Squirrel Baby Season is Twice a Year We love to watch squirrels at the park and kids chase them playfully without worry (usually!). Usually, we think of playful and innocent creatures jumping branch to branch and innocently gathering nuts for a later meal. We can’t think of anyone who doesn’t like squirrels, until they become a pest. So we get a ton of calls about squirrel problems, and share info on squirrels here plus talk about them in plenty of our squirrel blog articles (yes, we’re squirrel experts)! Who Doesn’t Love Squirrels? But we get it, homeowners want to get rid of them when they take up residence in their attic. ![]() Don’t get us wrong, we love squirrels and always remove them humanely. In research published in the journal Epidemics, they found the squirrelpox virus in more than 80% of grey squirrels, with greys repeatedly reinfected with the virus.Ĭhantrey said: “It shows that the virus is very widespread and greys are at a very high risk of introducing pox to red populations.In Southern Ontario – including the areas served by us at Regional Wildlife Services (Burlington, Oakville, Milton and West Greater Toronto) the common squirrels we find are the Eastern Grey Squirrels and Red Squirrels. Prof Julian Chantrey and colleagues at Liverpool University tested more than 100 grey squirrels over 16months. The spread of grey – and black – squirrels has caused the extinction of red squirrels in much of England because the native reds succumb to the squirrelpox virus, which is carried by greys but leaves them unscathed.Īnother study in which grey squirrels on the Wirral were tested for squirrelpox every month has found that greys survive in the wild even when carrying the virus for months. The first was spotted near Letchworth in 1912 today black squirrels are most commonly seen across Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. In Britain, black squirrels were imported from North America and then escaped from private zoos. “This may have contributed to the expansion of the grey squirrel’s range during the past 11,000 years, following the end of the most recent ice age, helping them spread further north into Canada.” “The fact black grey squirrels have become so common right across North America is possibly because black fur offers a thermal advantage, helping them inhabit regions with extremely cold winters,” she said. ![]() McRobie said the most likely explanation for the black version of the gene being found in the grey squirrel was the result of a black fox squirrel joining a grey squirrel “mating chase” and mating with a female grey. ![]() They discovered that other “signatures” on the mutated gene were more closely related to the fox squirrel, suggesting the mutation probably arose in the fox squirrel and passed to the grey through interbreeding. Helen McRobie of Anglia Ruskin University worked with colleagues from Cambridge University and the Virginia Museum of Natural History in the US to test DNA from grey and fox squirrels across North America. Black squirrels are the same species as the grey but acquired their coat through a faulty pigment gene identical to that found in the fox squirrel, a closely related species that is also native to North America and has black variants. ![]()
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