Squirrel song

January 21, 2008 1:22 PM

There's the white squirrels of Exeter, and the black squirrels of London. Apparently they're both awesome if you like squirrels, or craft songs about them.
posted by joelf (27 comments total)

Kent State in Ohio has an annual Black Squirrel Festival, and some folks in London, Ont wish they did too.
posted by ardgedee at 1:50 PM on January 21, 2008

There was a white squirrel (we always called him/her an albino squirrel, though I don't know if that was technically correct) that lived on the quad when I was at Tufts. I'm sure there were songs written about it, but thankfully, they must be lost to the depths of history.
posted by Rock Steady at 2:00 PM on January 21, 2008

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walkin with the queen, doin' the black squirrels of London.
I saw Lon Chaney Jr. walkin with the queen, doin' the black squirrels of London
I saw a black squirrel drinkin' a pina colada at Trader Vic's...
And his hair was perfect.
posted by katillathehun at 2:05 PM on January 21, 2008 [1 favorite]

Black squirrels are the dominant strain of Grey around where I grew up in Central Minnesota. They are pretty easy to see if they are on the ground, but they are extremely difficult to see in shade.

Apparently the coloring pattern of your typical american Grey Squirrel matches up pretty well with that of grass, when the image is seen without color. I learned this by attempting to take a B&W picture of one in the yard one day. They are a little easier to see in the trees though. So, I think (at least in that local population) that something got pretty good at killing squrrels that were grey, and the black ones are an adaptation for that. But IANAEB, so take that with a grain of salt
posted by ArgentCorvid at 2:12 PM on January 21, 2008

Cute. I'd never even heard of a black squirrel until I visited Toronto. I'd thought a squirrel was a squirrel, always grey.

(Squirrel is a fun word to say and type, and probably very valuable in sqrabble.)
posted by not_on_display at 2:42 PM on January 21, 2008

Nobody writes songs about the Black Squirrels of Westfield, Wisconsin.
posted by louche mustachio at 2:43 PM on January 21, 2008

Western North Carolina for the win. White Squirrel Festival
posted by bitslayer at 2:49 PM on January 21, 2008 [1 favorite]

I have also seen black squirrels in Princeton, New Jersey.
posted by annieb at 2:55 PM on January 21, 2008

See also Olney, IL.

likesuchasand and I went on a big road trip and went through Brevard, NC, home of the White Squirrel Festival. That was pretty cool for a squirrel aficionado like her.

I used to work at the Texas State Capitol, and there were at least two white squirrels on the grounds. I saw them almost every day at lunch. They had a healthy sense of their own conspicuousness, which is I guess how they managed to survive.
posted by fiercecupcake at 3:08 PM on January 21, 2008

Pepsisquirrel Monochrome
posted by CynicalKnight at 3:28 PM on January 21, 2008

There is an albino squirrel that lives across the street from me, it's very white but it uses all the camouflage strategies of it's darker kin, to a humorous effect. It will run up a tree and if it senses you watching it, it will freeze trying to blend in. The problem is that it stands out like a beacon, and if you get close enough, you can watch it's little rodent brain thinking "dude, I am so fucking hidden. This guy has no clue I'm just a couple of feet away..."

And I noticed the last time I was up in the Wisconsin Dells (a resort town about 100 miles North-West of Milwaukee) that they have a number of black squirrels running around. I really wanted to bring one back and breed it with the albino just to see if I could create some sort of mutant and bizarre never-before-seen "gray" squirrel.
posted by quin at 3:38 PM on January 21, 2008 [1 favorite]

There are black squirrels where I live too. Freaked me out at first.
posted by miss lynnster at 3:50 PM on January 21, 2008

That London song had me and my girlfriend in tears laughing. We didn't have the video to describe where all the stuff was in the park, so we were wondering what squirrels had to do with roller tanks and cannons.
posted by joelf at 3:58 PM on January 21, 2008

And then there's the great battle occurring between the Greys and Reds over in the UK, unfortunately, the reds are falling back in the face of massive numbers and biological warfare.
posted by Atreides at 4:12 PM on January 21, 2008

I was surprised on a recent visit to the University of Maryland, College Park, to see a black squirrel. But I didn't see any evidence of a population of them, the way you do farther north. Presumably the occasional black coat is natural among Eastern gray squirrels anywhere, but has become a dominant coloration over a restricted part of their range?
posted by Creosote at 4:18 PM on January 21, 2008

The black squirrels in North America are an introduced variety that is more aggressive and actually castrates male grey squirrels. Not to say the greys don't deserve it as that's what they do to fox squirrels and why the fox's range is shrinking.

Fuck you black squirrels.
posted by Pollomacho at 4:23 PM on January 21, 2008

The black squirrels of Washington DC (WaPo) are apparently descended from 18 Canadian squirrels that were released by President Theodore Roosevelt in the grounds of the National Zoo.
posted by Pallas Athena at 4:44 PM on January 21, 2008

Highland Park Illinois has black squirrels too, but I've never seen one in the neighboring towns. They must like the cache of the 60035 zip.
posted by nax at 5:10 PM on January 21, 2008

I grew up with black squirrels and thought they were common everywhere, until I went to college and people were sort of bragging about the local black squirrel population. Weird.
posted by caddis at 5:30 PM on January 21, 2008

Can somebody provide a link to the YouTube video? The embedded YouTube video in squirrel song page links to luckycoin.ca and can't actually be played.
posted by ardgedee at 5:31 PM on January 21, 2008

Ah, nevermind. Exeter's "WHITE WONDER" By Peter Snell
posted by ardgedee at 5:36 PM on January 21, 2008

There's at least one black squirrel in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. I saw it one day while running. It appeared in my peripheral vision and initially I thought it was a garbage bag blown by the wind. Then I thought it was possibly a cat. When I realized it was a squirrel, I briefly entertained the notion that some wag had spray-painted it.

We had only gray squirrels in northern California where I grew up.
posted by DeWalt_Russ at 9:11 PM on January 21, 2008

DeWalt_Russ writes "There's at least one black squirrel in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. I saw it one day while running. It appeared in my peripheral vision and initially I thought it was a garbage bag blown by the wind. Then I thought it was possibly a cat. When I realized it was a squirrel, I briefly entertained the notion that some wag had spray-painted it.

"We had only gray squirrels in northern California where I grew up."

There may be mostly gray squirrels in most of NoCal, but there's a small black "scrat" variety on the SF Peninsula. I was shocked to see them in Menlo Park and Palo Alto when I lived there in my 20's. I grew up 25 miles away and had never seen them before.
posted by Araucaria at 11:56 PM on January 21, 2008

The black squirrels in northern California are in Palo Alto, Redwood City and up the Peninsula. They have them here in San Mateo, but mixed with others. In Palo Alto pretty much all of the squirrels seem to be black. Wikipedia

And if you guys are interested, here's the introduction to squirrel fishing.
posted by miss lynnster at 12:43 AM on January 22, 2008 [1 favorite]

And it's miss lynnster (again) for the win.

In a word, LOLZ!
posted by humannaire at 1:03 AM on January 22, 2008

Here in the UK black squirrels are rare but can be found in a swathe of land about forty miles north of London. They're most common around Letchworth, which has adopted them as its town mascot.
posted by Major Clanger at 2:50 AM on January 22, 2008

Metafilter: A new approach to rodent performance evaluation(via miss l)
posted by nax at 7:15 AM on January 22, 2008