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.
‘Ostaria’— from a Red Squirrel doe’s point of view
by Heather McBain
After Liz Gibson
Ostaria wakes ‘gan-ger-gan’ to breathe new life
from constant storm to our forest home last Fall
North wind crashed the upright Pine;
echoes sounded ‘friend’ or ‘foe’
with few hides left to go.
Night noise sates starvation’s gnaw
wrenched from Gaeaf’s claw:
hear Grey squirrel’s scream, held at bay
too portly to climb out the way
outwit the Pine Marten: my tufty ears quicken
to the call as Buzzard on upward thermal air
warms to the prospect of ‘new blood’.
We Reds ‘cwtch’ close to Beech leaves
in the drey, sphagnum moss fusty
from Samhain’s claw, shiver as Crow
finds carcass to sate ‘chwant’
Ostaria wakes to new life’s call.
Ostaria – late March, time of mating
Samhain – time of hibernation Gaeaf – winter
gan-ger-gan – cheek by cheek
chwant – appetite
