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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.