Where does Eastern grey squirrel come from?
The grey squirrel comes from eastern North America. Britain's familiar park squirrel is an American import: landowners released it on their estates from 1876 onwards, and it has since replaced most of the country's native red squirrels.
An American forest-maker
The eastern grey squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis, is native to the eastern and midwestern United States and the southern parts of Canada's central provinces. Like many squirrels it is a scatter-hoarder: each one buries several thousand small caches of nuts and seeds every season and finds them again by memory, using landmarks near and far. It is counted among the most important natural regenerators of the eastern forests, and its fossils go back to the Pleistocene.
A Victorian novelty
In 1876 Thomas Brocklehurst released a pair of grey squirrels, brought back from a business trip to America, at Henbury Park in Cheshire. Other landowners saw the newcomers as a fashionable novelty and followed suit. Around 1909 the Zoological Society of London let greys breed freely in Regent's Park, where after a slow start they suddenly became 'ubiquitous'. Further releases and a fast-growing population carried them across Great Britain by the early to mid-20th century, and in 1948 they reached Italy.
Why people say Britain
Grey squirrels are now so common in British parks and woods that few people think of them as foreign. In 2012 up to 5 million were estimated to live in the UK, against 120,000 to 140,000 native reds, three-quarters of them in Scotland. Greys compete with reds for food, raid their caches and carry squirrelpox, a virus that leaves greys unharmed but kills reds. Since 2016 the European Union has listed the grey squirrel as an invasive alien species.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Eastern gray squirrel ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Eastern grey squirrels in Europe ↗ · theguardian.com ↗
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