I'm dreaming of a white squirrel!

Well, not dreaming exactly, but I've been hearing about one, seen very recently in Addingham! So far my WNS network has come up with two quite separate sightings. The first was of a white creature seen running along a wall top, and my informant slowed down his car and got a really good look at it - the same size as a grey squirrel, he said, but completely white except for its eyes which were dark. Probably the same animal was also seen in a local garden.

Quite wide variations of colour do occur among animals of the same species - including the squirrel population. We have all seen grey squirrels which have quite a sandy cast to their fur, and our pretty native red squirrels can come in a wide range of shades from light ginger to black. This is all quite natural. However, our white squirrel is different. Its dark eyes are important, as this confirms that it is not an albino - where the absence of the melanin causes the eyes to be pink - but a leucistic squirrel, a condition caused by lack of pigment in the pigment cells. It's rare. However, some years ago WNS had a record, and photograph, of a very pale, silvery squirrel seen - yes, also in Addingham. Perhaps a forebear of our snowy visitor? It's all in the genes!

Birds can also throw up leucistic individuals from time to time. Last winter my sister was very puzzled by a small bird which turned up at her bird feeder. It was a very pale, creamy white but with some buff patches. Careful perusal of the reference books led to a rather wobbly conclusion that it might be a snow bunting - but, since these are generally seen in flocks in winter, this seemed unlikely. Her local County Bird Recorder put her right. It was a leucistic chaffinch. This fitted - it always came to her garden along with a small mob of chaffinches and behaved in the same way. Indeed, when she looked closely through binoculars, she could see ghostly outlines of wing bars along its creamy sides.

Meanwhile, redwings, those elegant winter thrushes with cream eyestripes and rusty red flanks, are very busy in local gardens rapidly stripping the cotoneaster and other berries. All over the region, the race is on as to who gets to the Christmas holly first: we've just lost.

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