I can only imagine the look on Donald Trump’s face when he was browsing the net over his morning java, clicked on his “Aberdeen” Google News alerts and saw:

“New £100,000 bridge will save Scotland’s red squirrels”

I haven’t had multiple run-ins with The Donald like TravelGolf.com’s Chris Baldwin, but I would like to believe he had a spit take, then furiously and repeatedly brushed his comb-over.

The planned bridge is specifically designed to allow red squirrels and other wild life to scamper across a major Aberdeenshire bypass safely. There are 120,000 red squirrels in Scotland, and apparently are V.I.P.

According to Wikipedia, the red squirrel’s numbers have been diminishing since the introduction of the American grey squirrel (see, even America’s squirrels can infiltrate European culture) along with the deforestation of their habitat.

Trump’s proposed $2 billion golf resort just north of Aberdeen has faced an enormous amount of local and environmentalist opposition. When I visited the site in October of 2006, Trump International officials said they had originally hoped to have broken ground by last June. They had me sold.

This June, however, there will be another set of hearings to determine the fate.

Local authorities, who’s feelings for their coastal land on the Menie Estate is seemingly equal in passion to that of saving the red squirrel, already rejected Trump’s plan, which was quickly revived by National authorities who didn’t want to send such a tree-hugging message to the deep pockets of developers globally.

My gut feeling is that if Aberdeen is willing to spend £100,000 to help squirrels cross the road, Trump Scotland is doomed unless the golf courses have miles and miles of intricate tunnels and bridges that allow current wildlife to live in harmony.

Real estate values are already slumping in the United Kingdom, so Trump is already late on hitting the peak market, no thanks to all the delays. Scotland has developed numerous golf & real estate properties over the last five years, so by the time his resort was ever completed, it’d simply be a dime-a-dozen in the country anyways.

If I had caught up to Trump at a celebrity golf event like Baldwin did recently, I would have urged him to flock to the more capitalistic - and one would assume less squirrel-obsessed - confines of Northern Ireland by now.

The endangered Red Squirrel of Scotland: Standing in the way of a Trump Golf Resort in Aberdeen.