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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Wild Things II

The Essay: Wild Things II: Episode 4: The Squirrel

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Factual: Science & Nature: Nature & Environment

The Squirrel

Episode 4

Episode 4: The Squirrel

Wild Things II

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Wild Things II, The SquirrelClose menu

Ruth Padel explores our feelings towards squirrels in biology, history and literature.

Ruth Padel explores our feelings towards squirrels, both red and grey, through biology, history and literature. Are they bushy-tailed friends or creatures of destruction?

Is the squirrel a bushy-tailed friend or a creature of destruction, chewing through electricity cables and stripping bark from trees? Are the grey ones marauding invaders and the displacers of the red squirrels, or do they too own a place in our physical and emotional landscape?

In her fourth Essay on native British wild creatures, the poet and writer Ruth Padel considers our attitudes to squirrels of both colours and explores how our responses to them have been shaped by biology, history and literature. She traces how the red population evolved, how grey squirrels were introduced and how conservationists are now trying to restore red squirrel numbers. She also evokes the many different ways in which writers through the centuries have responded to them.

Producer: Emma Kingsley.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Series in which poet and writer Ruth Padel explores our reactions to native wild animals

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Episode 4: The Squirrel

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