This clip shows a particular route used by squirrels at Stuck Cottage
Red squirrels at Port Bannatyne feeder
Red squirrels were first spotted here in January 2026. Click to watch the trail cam footage
Trail cam footage of one of the hair sample tubes placed in Barmore Wood, Bute.
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The red squirrel genetics project is making good progress. We have hair tubes out at three locations in Bute, with at least three more sites planned for later in the summer. Each hair tube is baited with nuts and a small sticky patch; a few hairs stick to the patch as the squirrel reaches in for its reward. It is a neat way to obtain hair samples because there is no trapping, so it’s stress-free for the squirrel.
The trouble with field work with red squirrels is that they don’t always show up when you want them to. At one site we have had lots of samples from week one (of eight weekly checks). At another we have slogged up the hill and through the woods for no hair samples at all. Yet.
Also, the red squirrels can learn that there’s more than one way to get a free lunch. In this video you’ll see that it has learned to knock the hair tube about until the nuts fall out. From the squirrel’s perspective, putting your head in a plastic tube with your bottom sticking out is a risky thing to do. Better to work out how to shake the nuts out.
The purpose of all this effort is to obtain DNA samples from the hair follicle cells on the ends of the strands of hair. From that we can see how closely related the squirrels are and how much they are able to mix between woodlands. We hope the results will shed light on what’s holding back our red squirrel population and therefore what we have to do to help them thrive.
All the technical work will be done by Rebecca Synnott, from the South-East Technological University (SETU) in Ireland. She will be extracting the DNA, analysing the results and coming up with practical recommendations for the conservation of Bute’s red squirrels. We are very lucky to have all this work done for us and the results could be very interesting indeed.
The Bute Red Squirrel Project has found several areas on Bute where red squirrels are living. But it seems that something is holding back our island squirrel population. Why aren’t our red squirrels as common as they are on the mainland in Argyll?
The most likely reasons include:
The challenge of finding out more about Bute’s red squirrels was taken up by Dr Rebecca Synnott from the South East Technical University (SETU) in Ireland. She has the backing of Research Ireland and the Vincent Wildlife Trust for this two-year post-doctoral study. She will be analysing the DNA of our squirrels, which will help to answer questions such as:
An important feature of this study is that it should provide us with information to help the practical work of the conservation of our red squirrels. It’s more than just an academic study.
But first we need those DNA samples from our red squirrels.
We are using hair tubes as a ‘minimally invasive’ method of collecting red squirrel DNA. The hair tubes are just lengths of plastic drainpipe, closed off at one end and attached to trees for about eight weeks. They are baited with hazelnuts, sunflower seeds and peanuts. The squirrels enter the tubes to collect the food and on the way out they leave a few strands of hairs on a sticky patch that we have placed inside the tube. On the ends of the hairs are some hair follicles and the cells in those follicles yield the DNA that Rebecca Synnott needs for her study.
We know from other studies that squirrels will return to the tubes and also visit multiple tubes. So they clearly view the exchange of a few hairs in return for a snack as a good deal. It’s a clever and low-cost technique and it is virtually stress-free for the squirrels.
The hair samples go into a freezer to preserve the DNA and will be sent by courier to Ireland. Rebecca Synnott can then start the painstaking laboratory work of extracting and analysing the DNA. This work could take a further six months.
I would like to acknowledge the enormous amount of work and dedication from everyone involved in this project. It sounds easy to simply place 10-20 hair tubes in a woodland. But when that woodland is on a 30 degree slope and there are no paths and it’s pouring with rain and you have to go out again next week and the week after and the week after that, it takes commitment. There’s also the hours required to turn drainpipe into hair tubes and create 300 sticky patches that are just the right design to collect squirrel hairs. If only we could explain all this to our squirrels, they would surely be very grateful.
Rebecca Synott:
SETU: https://www.setu.ie
Research Ireland:
Vincent Wildlife Trust: https://www.vwt.org.uk/