The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
This rare gray squirrel is white — but why?
Earlier this month, when Michael Pickering got home in Ridgefield after going to church, his wife Karen called him over to the window.
There, scampering around their deck, was a snow-white squirrel.
The squirrel has returned several times. It’s found easy pickings at the Pickerings.
“He’s been eating the bird seed we leave out there,” Michael Pickering said.
The squirrel, although rare, is no new species, no Arctic or Asian oddity transplanted to the Connecticut burbs.
It’s a leucistic Eastern gray squirrel — a gray squirrel that, because of the roll of the genetic dice, isn’t able to produce melanin — the substance that gives color to fins, feathers, fur and skin.
“It’s uncommon,” said Jenny Dickson, head of the wildlife division of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “But it happens.”
It’s different from albinism. With that rare genetic disorder, the body can produce no melanin whatsoever. Along with
pale skin and hair, albinos have pink eyes. The Pickering’s squirrel has dark brown eyes, making it leucistic.
Leucism occurs across the animal spectrum and with varying degrees. There are leucistic hedgehogs, leucistic wombats, leucistic pythons and crows. There’s been an all-white moose spotted in Sweden this year. In 2012, a bison farmer in Goshen had a white buffalo born in his herd.
They can also be things of legend — think of Moby Dick.
Leucistic animals can be all white, or piebald — a mix of white and other colors. In 2012, I saw a leucistic red-tailed hawk — an all-white hawk with rufous tail feathers.
Naturalist Laura Simon said, in her previous job as an urban ecologist with The Humane Society of the US, her office used to get calls about all white animals.
“One time we got a call about a white raccoon,” she said. “The people thought it was an alien.”
They’re rarities. Both Catherine Rawson, executive director of the Northwest Connecticut Land Conservancy — the state’s largest land trust, with its headquarters in Kent — and Ann Taylor, executive director of the New Pond Farm nature center in Redding, said they’ve not heard of any leucisitic animals of their various properties.
Which, Taylor said, shows how uncommon they are.
“Think of all the people walking around the farm, looking for wildlife,” she said.
Rawson said she has seen the opposite of the Pickering’s squirrel — black squirrels, along Route 341 in Kent.
They’re gray squirrels too, but with a genetic make-up darkens their fur from silvery to inky. They show up in pockets throughout the state and may be more common than they have been in the past.
“We’re more likely to hear about melanistic black squirrels,” said Dickson of the DEEP.
They, like their leucisitic cousins, stand out in a crowd. In general, mammals in the U.S. are drab — grays, pale browns, russets, dappled with patches of white here and there.
Birds can have brilliant reds, and yellow and iridescent green feathers. Fireflies flash yellowgreen. Butterflies come with the whole paint box of colors.
The reason for all this show is to get noticed, to attract a mate.
Mammals on the other hand, have evolved other modes of courtship, including scent.
Their muted colors camouflage them. They move around the landscape with less notice.
But even within that less-than-splashy look, there are variations. Coyotes can be auburn, tan, brown or black. Pups born in the same litter can look different
And they change color. “Right now, white-tailed deer are much redder than they will be later in the summer,” Dickson said
And there are mink, with white fur in winter, brown in summer, the better to scurry undetected in the season-changing landscape.
But being all white, all the time, is a distinct disadvantage to a small animal like a squirrel. The color makes them stand out, allowing a hawk, an owl, or a coyote to spot them more easily. Which may explain why they’re rare — they get pounced on early in life
“For a big animal, it might not matter as much,” naturalist Laura Simon said. “But for prey, it’s like wearing a neon sign saying “Eat Me!’ ”
Which makes things like an all-white squirrel more than an oddity. It’s a little thing of wonder.
“When people would call up and say they saw an all-white raccoon, and ask “What is it? I’d tell them ‘You’re so lucky.’ ” Simon said.
“In nature,” Dickson said, “you never know what you’re going to see.”