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Kevin
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« on: January 08, 2010, 08:01:36 am » |
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Clemson squirrel round-up to save trees
A 1-pound rodent with a brain the size of a walnut is causing a lot of grief at Clemson University.
Too many Eastern gray squirrels apparently are running amok on campus, killing trees and costing the university $100,000 a year in tree damage.
Enter the great squirrel roundup.
Clemson contracted with U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Service biologists to remove an abundance of the critters and then euthanize them.
Two hundred squirrels have been trapped on campus. Clemson’s 800-acre campus has two to three times the normal population of squirrels per acre and that creates “safety, environmental and economic problems,” said facilities director Bob Wells.
“At least 100 mature trees have died as a result of squirrel damage in the last 10 years, and arborists estimate that at least 10 percent of the trees on campus have been affected,” Wells said.
Clemson isn’t the only university overrun with creatures.
Yarrow said Cornell University in New York allows limited deer hunting on the edge of its campus and squirrel hunting by archers.
At Clemson, all the work was in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act and was limited to 200 squirrels because of federal guidelines, Wells said.
Greg Yarrow, a professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson, said squirrels chew on bark for food and to mark their territory.
With two breeding cycles a year, they mark a lot of trees.
“They chew all around the limbs, chewing the bark off all the way to the cambium (layer) of the tree,” Yarrow said.
That’s bad news for the the tree, he added. “Eventually it kills the tree.”
Normally, there are four to five squirrels per acre in a wooded area, Yarrow said, but at Clemson there are about 14 per acre.
An outside arborist put the cost from the loss of each tree at $13,000, including seedling, planting, maintenance over time and removal of mature trees after damage by squirrels — driving the university’s 10-year total to exceed $1 million, according to a statement.
Wells said the estimated costs could be as high as $100,000 per year, not considering the potential safety hazard if a tree limb or whole tree fell on someone.
Several tree limbs have landed on vehicle windshields, damaging them, officials said.
Clemson has tried the past two years to reduce its squirrel population.
That was by means of a birth control research program, but it has not controlled the population on a large enough scale.
The squirrels’ natural predators, such as hawks and owls, do not exist on campus in sufficient numbers to maintain a natural balance, Yarrow said. Also, students and staff feed the squirrels, helping keep them on campus.
“We are trying to discourage that,” Yarrow said.
This year trees have produced a lot of acorns, so “we’ll probably have a another good population of squirrels,” he said.
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