Visiting friends in Ann Arbor yesterday. They live in a great area with woods and a tree-filled golf course behind the woods abutting their back yard. The house has an upper level deck with bird feeders and yesterday the tufted titmice, black-capped chickadees and one white-breast nuthatch were busy.
Cleaning up the spilled seeds on the deck below was this [probably] juvenile Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) with white ear tufts. I looked through gray squirrel photos on Google images and a couple did show squirrels with white ear tufts. Additionally, there were photos of completely albino gray squirrels. I took these photos through the picture window with my iPhone camera.
This little squirrel was so cute and the first I've seen with white ear tufts.
2 comments:
Gray squirrels grow white ear patches only if they live in a area that gets snow. We're in mid-Michigan, and all our gray squirrels have them in winter. By early summer, they will be gone.
I saw a grey squirrel with white ears this morning in Cumberland Maine. Only the back of its ears were white and could be seen as it walked away from me. I’ve lived in Maine for 55 years and this is the first one I’ve noticed.
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