Back in black

During my undergraduate days at Haverford College, that small liberal arts institution founded by Quakers a few miles west of Philadelphia, there was an earnest debate about whether our athletic teams should have an official mascot, and if so, what it should be.

The Fighting Quakers moniker clearly didn’t apply, though there was a faction that favored going with the Wild Oats.

Since the Society of Friends makes every decision by consensus, we ended up without an official mascot and were stuck as the plain old ’Fords.

Now I’ve come to understand a new unofficial mascot has firmly taken root. Black squirrels, once a reference to non-Quaker Haverfordians, are today the predominant fur bearer on campus in the compact size category. They can even be purchased as plush toys in the campus bookstore — a sure sign that they have hit the big time.

Black squirrels are the melanistic form of the eastern gray squirrel, and once predominated throughout their range in the first-grown forests, where their dark coloration gave them a survival advantage.

They persisted in the Midwest and in Canada when they all but disappeared from the Northeast, but are making considerable inroads from Washington, D.C., (where they were introduced) and elsewhere.

Some gray squirrel litters still produce kits with the mechanistic mutation, and here in the Northwest Corner I see them more and more often.

Black squirrels will sometimes drive off their gray cousins, and their dark coloration helps them retain heat in cold weather. As the Eastern forests mature, black squirrels may become more common here, though if the warming trend continues they may find it more advantageous to shift their core range southward.

There is no getting around the fact that black squirrels look much hipper than their grizzled gray relatives. I must confess I find them a much better choice of college mascot than a pigeon, or a starling or whatever other fauna inhabit the Philadelphia suburbs nowadays.

Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at greensleeves.typepad.com.