My dad has spotted a melanistic squirrel with some white markings.
I am hoping to get a photo.
It could be one of those black morphs of fox squirrel, or it could be an unusual melanistic gray. About a third of the gray squirrels here are actually black.
Maybe it’s something like this.
It may be an odd thing, but in my neighbourhood and the two adjacent conservation areas, there are only black squirrels.
In NYC, there are a lot of black squirrels. I forget where they came from. I love the spots—maybe you’ll see one with Boston Terrier markings!
I remember that one particular black squirrel coming over to the window of my apartment near Morningside Heights Park on 110th street expecting her daily morsels. This was many moons ago.
:-)
Ft. Meade MD, also has a large population of melanistic Grey Squirrels. Although the mutation may crop up fairly often, the most common reason around MD for a local population of these variants is transplantation by human beings. People love them!
The chiltern hill beechwoods abound with the long introduced American eastern greys, including the pair in our garden which have yet to to gain access to our cleverly designed peanut feeder, but there seem to be no black variants yet, although they are commonly reported from other parts of Britain.