Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Melanistic Squirrels with Golden-Brown Tails


I had never seen a squirrel like this anywhere until last year, when one started hanging around our neighborhood. Except for the color, they are standard Eastern Gray Squirrels. We've always had a few solid black ones (melanistic, in science-speak), but these were new. This year we have two, or maybe three.

A quick dive into the internet reveals that these guys are uncommon, but do show up here and there. There are even weirder variants, with striped tails or patchwork colors. And there are solid white ones, of course; I've seen a few of those myself, and there's a town in Illinois that's famous for them.

Wikipedia says that "Urban populations of the species were found to have a higher frequency of black morphs." I'm just going to leave that alone.

The picture above, by the way, is one I swiped from a website. The little buggers are never around when I have a camera. But that's what they look like.

5 comments:

Trooper York said...

They call it the Obama. Sort of black.

Calypso Facto said...

That's a good look in a squirrel. (Dennis Rodman, not so much.) Lots of all-black and all-white squirrels where I am. And I see some strawberry blonde gray squirrels at one of our offices. But I have never seen a combo like that -- thanks for posting.

Dad Bones said...

After a lifetime of seeing nothing but brown squirrels here a couple winters ago a brown squirrel with a black face and underside made a debut on my squirrel feeder. Squirrels being pretty androgynous I'm still going to assume it was a male. For one thing he could hold his own on the feeder. There was only one brown squirrel who could chase him away. And since then a couple more little black bellied squirrels have sprung from the trees.

ampersand said...

In Oak Park Squirrels beez racis.

ndspinelli said...

Had a Johnny Winter albino squirrel in our neighborhood a few years back.