21 SEPTEMBER 1945, Page 18

A Playful Crime

Walking last week in the beautifully treed garden of a country house, I came upon two trees that were apparently in the sere and yellow leaf. Every leaf on a vigorous young sycamore was brown and dead. The cause was not any disease, but the grey squirrels. They are numerous in the neighbourhood, and nothing can stop their infinite variety ; they develop a new crime yearly. This year they have taken to the amusement—it can scarcely be anything else—of peeling off the bark beginning near the top of the tree, and they peel off so much that all the upper part of the tree dies. I have seen jackdaws play this game —once in the precincts of New College, Oxford—but their damage was negligible compared with the ravages of the squirrels.