COUNTRY Lift SOME personal experience, and evidence from a number
of unvisited places, leads me to the happy belief that the native red squirrel is resumini its range. It is certainly found in good numbers in many districts a' the West Country—and I hear of it in the shires both of Hereford ant' Hertford. It is an angel compared with the grey foreigner (against whici heavy charges were made even by Buffon, just two hundred years age in reference to, South American experience). I have known the brown squirrel (once very common, for example, in Huntingdonshire) to raid a rookery soon after the eggs were hatched ; but such excesses are, I think, quite rare: and it is the most engaging of all our wild animals The introduction of the grey was a grievous mistake (though that, too, is engaging enough), as the late Duke of Bedford realised, and no one has dared to whitewash it, as the little Spanish owl, beloved by the late Lord Lilford, has been whitewashed by the scientific analysers of pellets. They have not persuaded field observers, but beyond question its favourite food is the beetle. The two apparently contradictory views were, of course, reconciled in that strange discovery (made by Sir George Courthope's keepers) that the owls used the young pheasants they had killed merely as a bait for burying beetles!
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