![]() ![]() Smart became fascinated by white squirrels when one showed up on the deck of his home about 12 years ago. According to local legend, a couple of the critters escaped from a traveling circus and began multiplying, or were the product of a weird experiment by a local scientist. White squirrels first appeared in Marionville around 1860, Smart says. “Marionville is a small town, but people who grew up here and moved away still remember their roots and want to help the white squirrel.” “We’ve had orders for T-shirts from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, Kentucky,” says Smart, a Lions member. More than 500 dens have been put up, and volunteers have planted hundreds of nut trees. The Lions Club sells white squirrel T-shirts and pins to raise money to buy redwood boxes that are placed in trees as homes for the squirrels. Signs of Marionville’s affection for the white squirrel, which mates and otherwise interacts normally with its gray cousin, are everywhere. ![]() “Normally you see an albino show up occasionally in a population such as squirrels or birds or deer, but entire populations are not something you come across all that frequently,” said Eric Kurzejeski, a state wildlife research biologist. Wildlife experts say finding any albino animal colony the size of Marionville’s is rare. Olney has a measly few dozen squirrels, he figures. “We’ve blown Olney off the map,” he boasts. Only one other community in the nation-Olney, Ill.-is known to have a sizable concentration of the snow-white squirrels, but Marionville’s colony is much larger, says James Smart, a local authority and booster of the animal. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |