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RE: Human influence on invasive species
Great post! Grey squirrels are pushing out red squirrels in The Netherlands too and we have a lot of invasive plants, like the Impatiens glandulifera, becoming dominant over native species.
Upvoted & followed.
I am always surprised to hear about North American species that are invasive somewhere else. I'm too focused on all the invasive exotic species we got from elsewhere, lol. And your invasive species are not invasive for us. Those grey squirrels are the number one hunted game species in the US. They have fed a lot of people over many, many years.
Maybe we should start hunting them as well.
I would recommend it! Here in Oregon's Willamette Valley, we have the big orange-tinted Fox Squirrel. I eat those regularly. I grew up eating the gray and the fox squirrels. Those two squirrels eat nuts and fruit and spend their time up off the ground. They are, by far, a cleaner, more disease-free meat than wild rabbits or hares.
Here's an interesting nugget about those gray squirrels: back in the time of European settlement and even into the early 1900s, every few years, the gray squirrels would go on a mass migration. Thousands and thousands moving across the forested landscape. There is some amazing reading about them. Squirrels are so interesting - I could go on and on, lol!
Migration? Like lemmings? Why? Too large a population? Or is it unknown why?
They haven't figured out why. The suspicion is a big acorn crop the year before that built populations up a lot. And then not enough food the next year. But the scale of the migrations was so large. In checking some history just now, my statement of thousands was way low -- some estimates of half a billion in one migration of the mid-1800s. I can't even imagine that.
Thanks so much! Thanks for commenting too. Here in Portugal we also have red-squirrel and, fortunately, it's not threatened by the gray one. We don't have Impatiens glandulifera, but we have others with great impacts on our biodiversity and fire regime like Acacia dalbata.
Following back ;)