Cramlington & District Red Squirrel Group, or should I say our first and only member initially set out 5 feeders back in July 2013 and then had monthly visits to check for squirrel activity.
Eventually he managed to rope in a few helpers and with 5 key volunteers, they concentrated their efforts in specific areas around Cramlington and the group was formed in August 2014, with these key volunteers.
A few years later the group had grown again to a small but dedicated bunch of keen red squirrel conservationists. Who simply did what they could. At that time we were keen to let people know that these charismatic creatures had made their homes in our many wooded areas, mainly created from the spoils of the mining industry, but we were always playing catch up and had to put any aspirational ideas to one side. However, our concentrated efforts paid off and the area we monitored was given official red squirrel stronghold status in 2018.
Roll forward to today and we cover an area of approximately 24 square miles and we are blessed to have permission to carry out our red squirrel conservation work on the whole area apart from one small woodland of approximately 3 acres. We have 40 volunteers and 200 monitoring stations which are checked every 7 to 10 days. Our group has transformed massively and also our support and public following has magnified beyond belief!
Many of our newer volunteers haven’t managed to meet up yet as all of our group meetings have been cancelled but when our ‘new normal’ comes along we would love to have even more people join us. Our group is also associated with the nature reserve in East Cramlington which we help maintain and use as a training hub. This is also where our squirrel rope bridges are so there is plenty of socially distanced work to do.
Below is a early image of how East Cramlington Nature Reserve looked and how it is today.
