Can a Small Town’s Protections for Albino Squirrels Inspire Other Cities to Guard Wildlife Against Cats?

Early one morning, licensed wildlife rehabilitator Belinda Henton was making her rounds in the annual albino squirrel count in Olney, Illinois, a small Midwest town known regionally as “the home of the white squirrels.” A few minutes into her stroll, Henton spotted her first albino squirrel of the day, an adolescent with conspicuous pink eyes and a bushy snow-white tail. It was playing in some tall grass or foraging for food, as squirrels do.

But unbeknownst to the critter, a large predator lurked nearby. It wasn’t a hawk, owl, coyote or other wild animal, but a domesticated cat, crouching behind a tree like a hunter ready to strike. Seeing the young squirrel in danger, Henton did as any citizen of Olney would do, quickly intervening to shoo the cat away. The feline ran off, and the squirrel escaped.

Yet the decline in white squirrel numbers in Olney is bigger than one loose feline. Free-roaming cats—domesticated cats that aren’t confined to a house—are the squirrels’ true No. 1 predator.

The cats are such a problem that the city passed an ordinance in 2002 decreeing that the felines could no longer run freely. That cats target small native species, like squirrels, and put a significant dent in their numbers is well known. A 2013 study, for example, found that free-ranging domestic cats kill 1.3 billion to 4 billion birds and 6.3 billion to 22.3 billion mammals annually.

What makes Olney a special case is the residents’ attitudes toward free-roaming cats. Many cat owners are notoriously attached to the idea that their pets must roam freely. A recent study showed that in the United Kingdom, while most cat owners articulate discomfort about their cats’ hunting prowess, they still feel they have no right to keep them indoors—but Olney residents say no. And they are going above and beyond to curtail the number of killings committed by cats.

If other towns adopt their approaches, it could save small animals of all kinds—including the millions of birds lost every year to cats, along with those rare and precious white squirrels.

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Olney’s white squirrels are an albino variant of the eastern gray squirrel, and while the eastern gray isn’t in immediate danger of extinction, these creatures’ albinism makes them very rare indeed; colonies of white subspecies are hard to find, and only a few cities like Kenton, Tennessee, and Brevard, North Carolina, boast them. And being albino leaves the animals at an incredible disadvantage. Albinism—a recessive trait that both parents must carry to guarantee their offspring have the gene—usually comes with an inherent evolutionary handicap, as the lack of pigment in their eyes increases glare from the sun, temporarily blinding the animals. Seeing and avoiding predators like cats becomes difficult. For those reasons, the squirrels are less likely to survive into adulthood to breed, and thus less likely to spread their genes.

An upside of being rare is that the squirrels have become a major tourist attraction for the city. Images of the white squirrels are plastered on the city’s signage and municipal buildings, and represented in souvenirs at local gift shops eager to spotlight the town’s favorite resident. To keep track of the albino squirrels, the city spends three days in October counting them, with volunteers like Henton scanning tree branches, wandering through parks and peering under bushes in search of the critters.

Since 1997, the counts have concluded that the albino eastern gray squirrels of Olney have been slowly disappearing, says Henton. “If early reports from 1941 are to be believed, there had once been 800 albino squirrels,” Henton says. “Recent years suggest we have more like 80 or so left.”

John Stencel, now 88 years old, a retired biologist who taught at Olney Central College, the originator of the squirrel count in 1977, is one of the few researchers seriously studying the area’s albino squirrels. “Cats are predators of the albino squirrels,” he says. If something isn’t done to help the squirrels, Stencel reasons, their local extinction—meaning they no longer exist in a certain area—could happen as early as 2034.

To even the squirrels’ odds of survival, the city passed other ordinances to go with the one that makes it illegal for cats to run at large. Another ordinance gives squirrels the right of way on all public streets, sidewalks and thoroughfares in Olney, and implements a $750 fine for harassing one. “We only enforce the ordinance if it is a deliberate car strike,” Henton says, “or when people are purposefully hurting the animals.”

These efforts could explain this past year’s albino squirrel count’s slight increase from years prior. On average, the 2024 count included 1,007 gray squirrels counted, and 81 albino white squirrels counted—an increase from the previous year’s 73 albinos. “Based on gathered numbers, the gray to albino ratio in 2023 was 11.75 to 1 compared to the gray to albino ratio in 2024 of 12.43 to 1,” says Kelsie Sterchi, Olney’s city clerk, who organized the 2024 squirrel count. Though the increase is small, it is a push in the right direction.

To complete this year’s count, squirrel lovers came from Missouri, Indiana, Iowa and all over Illinois. Henton isn’t surprised by the interest in squirrels and says in recent years people came from as far away as New York. “There was a Squirrel Lovers Club in Chicago that would come down and count every year,” Henton recalls. She says that one member “moved here a few years ago just to be closer to the squirrels.”

The number of people caring about the plight of squirrels, regardless of their hue, may be at an all-time high. The euthanasia of an Instagram-famous pet squirrel by New York wildlife officials even became a campaign talking point days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election—and a running gag on social media.

The white squirrels have certainly captured the hearts and minds of Olney residents. “They’re not like other small mammals coming into yards. People like to watch their antics and feed them,” Henton says. “Last year, the [city of] Olney gave away 200 bushels of corn to anyone who wanted to come and get them to feed the local squirrels. Everyone was jockeying for a place in line, you’d swear the carnival had come to town.”

Michelle Mastro | READ MORE