Brevard, North Carolina, has about people and 3,000 to 5,000 squirrels. About a third of those squirrels are white! They aren't albino squirrels, though, they are eastern grey squirrels with a heritable mutation that makes their fur white. They have dark eyes like their gray cousins, and sometimes streaks of gray in their fur. The story goes that in 1949, two white squirrels were traded from a carnival that was passing through. A Brevard resident tried to get them to breed with each other, but one escaped and the other was released, and they mated with local squirrels, passing on the mutated gene.
Brevard is so proud of their white squirrels that the town has taken the title of White Squirrel Capital of the World. The town hosts the White Squirrel Weekend festival every year in late May or early June. And Brevard is a squirrel sanctuary, where they are legally protected. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Philippe Dekyvere)
