The Clocaenog Red Squirrel Trust has collaborated with eco-poet Diana Sanders to highlight the challenges facing Clocaenog’s endangered red squirrels through poetry. Eco-poetry blends creative expression with environmental activism, offering a powerful way to engage people with issues such as habitat loss, noise pollution, disease from grey squirrels, and the wider vulnerability of this rare Welsh species. Through these poems, Caro Collingwood (Red Squirrel Ranger) and Diana hope to inspire greater awareness and support for red squirrel conservation.
Each week we’ll be featuring one of the poems written in Diana’s workshop.
Red Squirrel by Jane McGill
My tribe is dying
Once we were many in your woods
The trees supported us
Gave us food and shelter
We did no harm to them
For they were good to us
We were a part of the landscape
in harmony with other inhabitants
The Pine Marten was our foe
we learned to avoid them
Otherwise we were free to roam
to dance our natural joy
perform our skilled ballet
in the silence of the woods
We thrived and were a part
for so many years of Britain
Then the incomer came
At first we did not see them as foe
they lived in trees and moved like us
grey and lithe bigger
they took our food
they damaged the trees
that gave us shelter
Interlopers
Worse they carried a virus
which did them no harm
but made us mortally sick
Sores came around our mouths
and on our feet
We could not eat
many of us died slowly starved
so our kits died too
There were less of us
Some people remembered us
as we were
They sought to help
brought extra food
tried to provide a safe place
for us to be
but it is not enough
My tribe is dying
Help us
