White squirrel lives on near Trinity Bellwoods Park

Mary Saunoris snapped this photo of a white squirrel near Trinity Bellwoods Park in Toronto, on Friday, March 20, 2015.

Mary Saunoris has lived in the same house just south of Trinity Bellwoods Park for five years, and she has long heard about the white squirrels.

There’s a Queen Street West café named ‘White Squirrel’ nearby, a street called ‘White Squirrel Way,’ and rumours of sightings in the large, downtown park.

But she’d never seen one herself. “I was beginning to think it was all just legend,” she says.

Then last summer she saw news reports that one was found dead and dangling from a hydro line. After that, she still thought she might never see one. What if that was the last one?

But on Friday morning, as she was heading to her public relations job, the mythic creature appeared on a fence in her backyard. She grabbed her phone and snapped a photo.

When she got to work, she showed it to impressed colleagues and posted it to Twitter, where others from the neighbourhood expressed their joy and relief.

Saunoris says the squirrel has red eyes, which makes her think it is an albino – an anomaly born without the ability to make the pigment.

Rudy Boonstra, a biologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who studies squirrels, says Saunoris is probably right. “I suspect this is a one-off,” he adds.

Boonstra says most Toronto squirrels are grey squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis), which have morphed to black to blend with the environment.

He says white squirrels wouldn’t survive in the wild because they wouldn't blend in, making them easy prey for predators like hawks. Even animals like snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus), which we think of as white, turn brown in spring when the snow melts and they can no longer blend in, he says.

In fact, that may explain why white squirrels seem more common in urban areas – fewer predators mean they last longer. “Toronto is forgiving,” he says.