Grey squirrels have been around in this island for only about a century and probably just a decade or so earlier in the next island. One thing about them that is new to this quarter is that they have been known to take and eat small birds, also to take and eat their eggs and nestlings. You learn something new every day. To see them landing on the bird-feeders gives no clue, for while birds already at that particular contraption will move to the next one, they do so with no appearance of fright, just go on eating at the next available source of monkey nuts or whatever. Red squirrels are said to do the same, but the greys, being bigger, can take larger prey. And, it seems, the taking of flesh occurs mostly at times when the normal fare of nuts, etc. in the wild is scarce.
As has been noted here before, a landowner in Scotland or northern England some time ago encouraged his gamekeepers to make it widely known that grey squirrels are good for eating. In stews or barbecues, much superior to rabbit. This is well known in the United States. And a long-ago correspondent to the English Field, dated only as 1930, wrote to that journal encouraging not only the killing and consumption of these tree-rats, but also of starlings, both on the grounds of their being pests of the countryside. "Undoubted edible qualities" were possessed by both, argued the reader.
He referred to the American experience with grey squirrels; English friends of his had pronounced them excellent eating. As for starlings, the reader had tried them himself and found them "to my surprise, neither musky nor bitter, and but a little inferior to sparrows". If they, meaning their corpses, could be distributed in numbers in our larger towns, they would provide a palatable meal for many poor people, while the task of securing them would provide very fair sport, especially for young people and for those with limited opportunities of obtaining nobler game." Isn't that a good one: "nobler game"?
The most famous starling in literary history, many of us will have read of in school, in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. He passes a starling in a cage on the stairs of an abode in Paris and hears a voice say clearly "I can't get out, I can't get out." It was the starling. So they can talk, too!