Outside my office in Palo Alto, California, is a pleasant green area where squirrels chase each other up and down a tree, run along the walkways outside the office, search for food in the gutters of the walkway roofs, and scamper on the lawn. Some are gray, and some are black; I’m told they’re all one species that simply comes in a range of colors, the way humans do. I have reason to doubt this.
You see, I have seen black squirrels before, in two and only two other cities: Hanover, New Hampshire, and Princeton, New Jersey.
If the previous sentence does not cause ominous music to begin to play in your interior soundtrack, I hope the paragraph break will. Let me repeat.
I have seen black squirrels before, in two and only two other cities: Hanover, New Hampshire, and Princeton, New Jersey.
Paragraph break. Ominous pause. Music rises.
photo: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK
Do you see the pattern here? Hanover, home of Dartmouth College; Princeton, home of Princeton University; and now Palo Alto, home of Stanford University. Top-flight research institutions all, with biological research underway. Yes, I will say it, and you may scoff but I know the truth: someone in a white lab coat is messing with our squirrels. And once in a while, a black squirrel escapes from the lab that created it and mixes with the local population of boring old gray squirrels, or as a neighbor of mine in Connecticut used to call them, “rats with bushy tails.” They vandalized her lilies, so her resentment was understandable. And I do mean “vandalized,” not “ate”; they would bite off the buds and leave them there, a vicious reminder that they and they alone controlled the fate of her garden. I have not caught the black squirrels or the gray squirrels in an act of vandalism, although I came in one morning to find the pot where I planted new agave shoots turned on its side and emptied of plants. At least that thief did something with them.
But I digress. My point is, black squirrels do not show up in East Podunk, Illinois, or Nowhere Center, Mississippi (until ten people add comments telling me the places they’ve seen them). They appear, mysteriously, in the hometowns of Ivy League and only-outside-Ivy-League-because-they’re-too-new-and-Western universities. They are the squirrel equivalent of the rats of NIMH, the hyperintelligent counterparts to the not-so-bright grays.
I shared this theory with Dan, our minister of religious education, and he has added a terrifying wrinkle. According to one report, black squirrels have been known to attack dogs. You read that right. Fatally, if the rumor’s true, so don’t click if you’re a dog lover.
It’s been warm this week and I’d normally prop my door open and let in the summer breeze. But the squirrels keep pausing outside my office door, having a peek through the glass. Once, I caught two of them looking at me at the same time. What happens if the black squirrels’ intelligence marshals the power of the gray army? If they organize, I and the peanut butter in my desk don’t stand a chance.
Sermons in Stones 
13 comments
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October 3, 2014 at 5:13 pm
Sonja
Amy,
Washington DC has a black squirrel population. If I recall the history correctly, they were introduced many decades ago to add interest and variety to the local squirrel population in Rock Creek Park where the National Zoo is. Since then, the black color has slowly spread into the greater city, although they have not quite reached the suburbs beyond the beltway yet.
Squirrels in Germany are a brownish red, somewhere between copper and chestnut. More reason to speculate!
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October 6, 2014 at 10:09 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
I wonder if the German squirrels are a reddish variety of the American gray / black squirrels, or are just like our red squirrels, which are a different species–another distinguishing characteristic is markedly longer ears.
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October 3, 2014 at 8:06 pm
Patrick Murfin
To confirm…and unconfirm….there was a large colony of black phase squirrels in Champaign-Urbana, home of the University of Illinois. But here in Crystal Lake in the Northwest boonies of Chicago we have had a colony around Woodstock street and no institution of higher learning within hollering or spitting distance.
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October 6, 2014 at 10:06 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Have you checked your neighbors’ basements for lab equipment?
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October 3, 2014 at 8:08 pm
Karen Skold
I have also observed the black squirrels of Palo Alto with growing alarm. They are aggressive and have apparently replaced the grey ones in all of Palo Alto.
I have been anxiously watching for these intruders on the squirrel highway that goes by our dining room window. Alas–black squirrels are now here in Mountain View! They not only chase the grey squirrels–they breed with them! I am now seeing squirrels with mottled black and grey fur.
Why is this a problem? Black squirrels are not cute! Grey squirrels have lovely fluffy tails but the tails of the black ones are thin and ratty looking.
Will grey squirrels become an endangered species? Who or what can save them now? Will Sunnyvale be next?
Meanwhile, Amy, I wouldn’t keep any kind of nuts in my office if I were you.
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October 4, 2014 at 8:58 am
johnarkansawyer
Nuts in the office aren’t always optional. In some jobs, they’re expected. There’s only one person in my office. And she is undoubtedly a little nuts. –AZM
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October 6, 2014 at 10:05 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
Grey squirrels will never be an endangered species. Despite their utter inability to evolve to cope with motor vehicles, they thrive like cockroaches, and will survive us all.
I’ve wondered about the ratty tails. (The grey squirrels have a lot of Rattiness Disorder too, but do seem fluffier than the black on the whole.) Maybe there is some kind of disease that affects their tails like mange, or maybe the black squirrels (now that they are growing confident) are shedding their disguise and revealing themselves to be, not rats with bushy tails, but simply rats.
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October 7, 2014 at 12:29 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
And by the way, Karen, your comment totally cracked me up. The squirrel highway . . . WILL SUNNYVALE BE NEXT? . . . hee!
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October 3, 2014 at 11:19 pm
Mary Donch
I’ve seen black squirrels for many years regularly in south-central Westchester, along the Harlem Line from north of Fleetwood station to maybe Scarsdale or so. Sarah Lawrence College and Concordia College are in the Village of Bronxville (within that range), but the black squirrels range well beyond Bronxville village, about five miles north and a mile south, but not very far east or west.
Now, the -white-squirrel I saw one day leaving Stratford station, that one made me take notice! From what others tell me, though, there are a few white or very pale grey squirrels int hat neighborhood.
Either way, they’re quite bushy-tailed.
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October 5, 2014 at 5:15 am
donbi33
When I moved to the foothills town of Evergreen, Colorado n 1982, there was a substantial population of black squirrels. They slowly disappeared. In contrast to your hypothesis, we believed that they were displaced by more aggressive red squirrels that moved up the canyon over several years. We haven’t seen black squirrels for many years.
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October 6, 2014 at 2:25 pm
Maddy
Ontario has black squirrels almost exclusively. Once in a while we see a grey one. I’ve forgotten which is normal and which is strange after 10 years here.
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November 10, 2022 at 11:49 am
Martha Kremer
Have you ever been to Toronto, Canada? I thought black squirrels were the only kind here, but you do see the odd grey squirrel. Black ones are fluffy, not rat-tailed.
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November 10, 2022 at 12:48 pm
Amy Zucker Morgenstern
I have, but I don’t recall noticing the black squirrels. All of the squirrels here have bushy tails, both the gray and the black, unless they have mange or something else that costs them some fur.
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