WrightwoodCalif.com Forum
Public Forums => San Gabriel Mtns Flora - Fauna => Topic started by: Chesslike on Jun 25, 11, 09:02:42 AM
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SAN BERNARDINO MOUNTAINS: Mites blamed for squirrel die-off
10:42 PM PDT on Friday, June 24, 2011
By DAVID DANELSKI
The Press-Enterprise
A stubborn skin disease is killing the iconic, bushy-tailed gray tree squirrels in the San Bernardino Mountains, a state biologist says.
For more than a year, state game officials have received calls from people who have found dead or dying Western gray squirrels in Big Bear Lake and other mountain communities.
Squirrels retrieved by game officials were either dead or so sick they died within hours, said Jeff Villepique, a wildlife biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game. Recent tests on at least six dead squirrels at a state laboratory in San Bernardino found they had been infected by the same type of mite, called Notoedres centrifera, he said.
The mites eat the animals' skin, causing mange that is characterized by sores and bald spots. The sores become infected with bacteria, killing the squirrel. Notoedres centrifera mites are found only in rodents and do not present a threat to people, cats or dogs, according to a Fish and Game news release.
David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy, said he first noticed a decline in the squirrel population at the conservation organization's 800-acre Bearpaw preserve in Forest Falls last year. This spring, a once-plentiful population of squirrels disappeared over a few months in the conservancy's 2,169-acre Oak Glen Preserve, an indication that the mites have spread from higher elevations to foothills, he said.
"It is really a huge loss over a large geographic area," Myers said. "The squirrels are really the iconic animal we see in the forested areas of the mountains."
The same mite species has caused Western gray squirrel die-offs elsewhere.
A 2001 article in the Journal of Wildlife Disease reported that the same mite decimated the squirrel population in forests of southwestern Washington state in the late 1990s. The article referred to another outbreak in the 1920s in the Eldorado National Forest, southwest of Lake Tahoe.
Villepique said he expects the species to recover.
Rodents and other wild animals often go through "boom and bust" cycles, when a population grows beyond an ecosystem's ability to support the numbers; then disease and starvation cut the numbers dramatically. Enough survive for the population to recover.
Humans may have aggravated the current die-off, Villepique said.
A backyard bird feeder at a mountain cabin attracted several squirrels to a single location, allowing the parasitic mites to spread from animal to animal.
"Natural foods are far more dispersed, and foraging squirrels (normally) have little contact with each other," he said.
Game officials are reminding people to not feed wildlife and to keep their cats and dogs away from raccoons, coyotes and other wild animals, which can transmit other types of mange and other diseases to pets.
Reach David Danelski at 951-368-9471 or ddanelski@PE.com
http://www.pe.com/localnews/stories/PE_News_Local_D_squirrels25.3b3b31f.html
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Do any of you "old-timers" remember when something similar to this occurred up here in the late '70's? When we moved here in '79, we were told that the local gray squirrel population had been recently wiped out (by something that sounded a lot like this).
After that, It was years before I saw gray squirrels, up here -- don't want to go through that again. (Even if they do steal the green peaches off my tree!) ;)
We seem to have such a nice healthy population of them now -- it would be a shame to lose the little rascals! :(
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Terry Graham's interesting story about squirrels
http://www.wrightwoodcalif.com/forum/index.php?topic=9704.0