Yahoo Lifestyle Why we celebrate black squirrels, but think of gray ones as pests
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Tyus Williams wrote his master’s thesis about jaguars. Williams wrote his senior thesis about jaguars while he was an undergraduate student. The article has been corrected.
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At the end of 2020, an unusual canine roaming the suburbs of Atlanta began popping up on social media. In the videos, a pointy-eared coyote jumps backyard fences for a (friendly) tussle with neighborhood dogs, sometimes running off with their squeaky toys, sometimes catching a nap under a trampoline or on a back porch.
“In most urban spaces, if you have a coyote who’s acting that bold, that coyote is going to get lethally removed pretty quickly,” says Sam Kreling, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington who studies urban ecology.
But this wasn’t just any coyote - he was melanistic. Instead of having gray or mottled fur like most coyotes, he wore a jet-black coat. Instead of frightening local residents, he bewitched them, earning the nickname Carmine, after the dark-haired “Laverne & Shirley” character. And instead of calling for his removal, residents campaigned for his safety.
Despite a state law mandating that any trapped coyote be euthanized, Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources gave special permission for Carmine to be relocated to the nearby Yellow River Wildlife Sanctuary, where he still lives today.
“They broke the rules based on public outcry, which is a real testimony to how much people cared about this coyote,” Kreling says. She’s one of the lead authors on a recent study that looks at why people are so fascinated by oddly colored animals - the very same ones we typically perceive as unsavory. While hardware store shelves are filled with squirrel and deer repellent, for example, the black or white or speckled versions of these animals enjoy heaps of human affection.
Kent State University has a black squirrel festival to celebrate the campus’s unofficial mascot, introduced by a grounds supervisor in 1961. Brevard, N.C., has a white squirrel weekend. When the ghost-white deer that roamed around St. Ansgar, Iowa, in the 1980s died, it was stuffed and put on display in the aptly named White Deer Park. And after a beloved black mule deer died in 2020, residents of Moab, Utah, raised money to mount the animal, who now resides in a state office building.
Around the country, these “charismatic color-morphs,” as co-author and UC-Berkeley PhD student Tyus Williams calls them, “are not treated as pests or threats - but celebrated and often memorialized.”
The idea to study unusually hued wildlife began at a dinner party of young scientists, where Williams, who wrote his senior thesis about jaguars while he was an undergraduate student, began wondering aloud about coloration in animals.
“I remember saying ‘people love jaguars. But people love black jaguars. Why is that?’” he says. “The idea just snowballed. We thought maybe there’s a psychosocial response going on here.”
Williams and his colleagues began digging through folklore, case studies, academic papers and news coverage to analyze how human preference for rare coloration - including lighter-colored variants with albinism or leucism and dark-colored variants with melanism - influences the perception and treatment of common animals.
In the end, Williams says, “there does seem to be a pattern that certain types of color elicit different responses.” In other words, humans are fascinated by - and even tend to favor - the color morphs in their midst.
For example, Wisconsin, a state that issues the fifth most hunting licenses in the nation, long prohibited the harvest of albino and leucistic deer. Oklahoma and Tennessee also prohibit the hunting of these animals.
“We love rarity. When something is uncommon, we tend to covet it and enjoy it and want to protect it,” Williams says.
It’s not just the hunting set. In Marysville, Kan., black squirrels are considered so precious they have the right of way at all traffic crossings. In Olney, Ill., drivers that run over or maim a white squirrel can be slapped with a $750 fine.
As far as why we gravitate toward differently colored animals, the researchers point out that humans have a long history of prejudice and predilection when it comes to animals’ coats - whether it’s the spooky black cats of European folklore or the sacred white “spirit bears” of British Columbia’s First Nations.
Color bias is also deeply embedded in American culture.
“It would be remiss not to acknowledge the history of this country is based on inherent biases of color,” Williams says. “I don’t want to say, ‘oh, it’s animal racism,’ but the data on colorism is there. And for humans, color has so much symbolism. Black can mean evil, unclean, or corrupt, where white is usually chaste and pure.”
But beyond cultural influences, psychological responses and Western ideals of beauty, Williams says there could be something far simpler at play: curiosity. “Humans are inherently curious about the strange and aberrant.”
Demetria Spencer says that people come from all over to see the famous white squirrels of Kenton, Tenn., a rural enclave about two hours northwest of Memphis. As the president of the White Squirrel Festival committee, she says visitors come from as far away as New York to see the albino rodents that have been scampering around Kenton for as long as anyone can remember.
“It’s just the culture of Kenton, everyone loves the white squirrels,” she says.
But the city’s love for its white squirrels isn’t limited to a single weekend in July. Kenton’s logo is emblazoned with its bushy-tailed mascot, and its website lists the population of white squirrels (200-plus) before the population of residents (1,195). March brings an annual rummage sale called the White Squirrel Spring Fling, and residents shop for holiday gifts at the White Squirrel Christmas Shop. White squirrels are also invited guests at city parks, which are equipped with feeders for the colorless critters. (Spencer says regular old gray squirrels are welcome, too.)
Other cities claim to be the home of the white squirrel. “But Kenton has the true white squirrels, the ones with the red eyes,” Spencer says. “I think that makes us stand out a little.”
But according to Kreling, urban color morphs such as white squirrels may be on the rise. Cities and suburbs feature a host of food sources (dumpsters, litter, animal-loving residents). They also offer a space “where there’s much less predator-prey interaction happening,” Kreling says. “So it kind of releases the constraint of having coloration that allows an animal to blend into the background.”
And white and black may provide better camouflage in populated areas. “In a city, an animal has a lot more kinds of backgrounds to blend into if needed, large swaths of asphalt or concrete. All these different colors.”
Kreling says citizen science platforms including iNaturalist have indicated an uptick in the population of color morphs, but she points out that the data should be taken with caution, because users are more likely to perk up - and snap pictures - in the presence of a color morph.
Locally, Washington’s black squirrels, which were introduced by the National Zoo more than 100 years ago, now make up as much as half of the District’s squirrel population.
At the Yellow River Wildlife Sanctuary in Lilburn, Ga., visitors still arrive to see Carmine, who now shares an enclosure with Wilee, a regular-colored coyote who was raised as a pet.
“I’m thankful he’s here,” says Abbey Patton, the sanctuary’s lead zookeeper. “It’s an opportunity to talk about coyotes in a positive way.”
Patton says that while many people are fearful of the wild canines, coyotes are just as scared of us as we are of them. “Carmine gives us a chance to have that conversation, to say they might be scary, but they’re wild animals and we need to respect their space. We can coexist in a positive manner.”
Williams, too, is hopeful that Carmine and other urban color morphs might start a larger dialogue about inherent biases in conservation practices.
“The story of Carmine illustrates that the public clearly has influence over ordinances or policies and the protection of animals,” he says. “And there are a lot of animals that get overlooked or villainized because they are not perceived as attractive or sexy or charismatic.”
Scientists are just as guilty of playing favorites, according to Williams. “The reality is we all have things that inspire us, things that intrigue us, that invigorate our spirits,” he says. “But we need to make sure we’re prioritizing animals based on how integral they are to ecosystem health. We need to hold ourselves accountable.”
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Ashley Stimpson is a freelance writer in Columbia, Md.
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