Jan 12, 2005
Black Squirrels
Nothing is black and white, or should that be grey and black?
As I type, I can see two grey squirrels chasing around my back garden, doing the kinds of things swuirrels usually do. But, there’s no sign of the slightly fluffier black squirrel we’ve been seeing around these parts since last November. I’m not worried for Cyril (obvious name really) but curious as to how the ecological dynamic is being disturbed by the grey incomers. Ironic really, given that the black is a simple genetic variant of the American grey and neither are native to the UK. We have our own red squirrel, which is increasingly rare even up North.
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David Bradley said,
April 29, 2008 at 10:03 am
It’s more than three years since I wrote this short post and it’s only now (April 2008) that the local news media have finally picked up on the story. Funnily enough though, people around Royston and Letchworth area have known about black squirrels for at least a couple of hundred years, there’s a pub in Letchworth called the Black Squirrel, after all.
db
IanB said,
May 1, 2008 at 6:39 am
It’s amazing how much fuss has been made about “Black squirrels now being found as far as Cambridge” - like you say; I grew up in Letchworth and thought nothing of seeing Black Squirrels since they used to play in our back garden and yes, when I lived there the ONLY pub in Letchworth was called The Black Squirrel (its alcoholic loneliness a legacy of the town’s original Quaker founders). There was something lurking in my distant memory that suggests we were told that the gene for being a black squirrel was dominant which is why the population had not been overcome by the grey coated variety but I could be wrong on that…it was a very long time ago!
David Bradley said,
May 1, 2008 at 7:19 am
It was the only pub, I’d forgotten that!
Apparently there are ten times as many blacks as greys in some part of the American mid-west. I think the only thing that’s new in the latest flurry of news is that Alison Thomas at Anglia Ruskin University spotted one in Cottenham, and published on the genetics just recently. There’s a reference on her web site to Thomas, A.P.M. & Pankhurst, S.J. (2005). The Black Squirrels of Cambridgeshire. Nature in Cambridgeshire, 46, 61. Dunno why the local paper took three years to learn about it, I know some press offices can be slow to pick up on their organisation’s scientific output but that’s extreme…
db