Chamber and committees

Further to the answers which Alasdair Allan MSP provided to questions S6W-31744 and S6W-31743 on 5 and 6 December 2024, I can confirm that there has been no change to the estimated ranges given below.

The most recent review of the population of British mammals, published in 2018, estimated the Scottish population of grey squirrels to be between 249000 and 808000 individuals; and the Scottish population of red squirrels at between 181,000 and 444,000 individuals.

Regarding the locations of the remaining populations of grey squirrels they are broadly distributed within three main zones as follows:

• The South of Scotland
• The Central Belt, Ayrshire and north-eastwards to Angus
• Aberdeen City

The South of Scotland population stretches across much of Dumfries & Galloway and the Scottish Borders, although not continuously, as there appears to be a gap in the species’ distribution from approximately Moffat to Langholm. In the east, grey squirrels occur in a strip near the coast from the English Border up to Edinburgh and up the Tweed Valley north-westwards into South Lanarkshire, thereby linking the southern population with the “Central Belt” population.

The “Central Belt” population extends from South Ayrshire northwards to Glasgow, Lanarkshire and the Firth of Clyde, extending up to the south of Loch Lomond (including several of the islands) and the Cowal Peninsula and eastwards to include Falkirk, Edinburgh and the Lothians. Northwards grey squirrels extend up to Stirling and Perth, across Fife and Clackmannanshire and over much of lowland Perthshire and Angus up to just north of Montrose.

The isolated Aberdeen population is restricted almost entirely to the City of Aberdeen and is the subject of an ongoing eradication programme as part of the Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrels project.

All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.