Missouri Town Goes a Bit Nutty About Its Rare, Protected Albino Squirrels

They are nuts about white squirrels in Marionville. Just ask the folks at the White Squirrel Furniture Store, the White Squirrel Car Wash or the White Squirrel Hollow Bed & Breakfast.

And watch where you’re driving: A 21-year-old city ordinance imposes a $500 fine for deliberately injuring or killing one of the rare albino squirrels. Motorists must yield the right of way to them.

No one has ever been arrested for violating the law, but that does not mean that it is taken lightly.

“If I catch somebody killing a white squirrel, I will issue a citation,” said Police Chief Jesse Merritt, who wears a squirrel-emblazoned shoulder patch on his uniform. “It’s no joke.”

Some people even go so far as to trap the albinos’ gray cousins and banish them from the small southwest Missouri town to give the white squirrels first crack at the nuts.

Marionville, home to 2,000 people and nearly half that many white squirrels, has a billboard welcoming visitors to the “Home of the White Squirrel.”

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.

“We’ve blown Olney off the map,” he boasts. Olney has a measly few dozen squirrels, he figures.

Wildlife experts say finding any albino animal colony the size of Marionville’s is rare.

“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.

Signs of Marionville’s affection for the white squirrel, which mates and otherwise interacts normally with its gray cousin, are everywhere.

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. More than 500 dens have been put up, and volunteers have planted hundreds of nut trees.

“We’ve had orders for T-shirts from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, Kentucky,” says Smart, a Lions member. “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.”

White squirrels first appeared in Marionville around 1860, Smart says. 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.

Smart became fascinated by white squirrels when one showed up on the deck of his home about 12 years ago. He set out to increase the population by trapping the more numerous gray squirrels in the woods around his home and releasing them several miles away to provide more room for the whites.

“We trapped 110 gray squirrels in a year and a half,” he said. “It was just amazing what the whites did then.”

Smart estimates that about three dozen albino squirrels live in 30 den boxes and in trees on his heavily wooded property.

“I have one picture at home with 17 white squirrels in it,” he said.

Retirees Johnie and Ann Clark spend hours on their back porch watching the white squirrels munch corn and walnuts placed at their feeders. The couple had no white squirrels until Smart transplanted some there a few years ago.

“They’ll play just like a little kitten,” Ann Clark said. “There will be five or six in the yard looking for something to eat and I’ll say, ‘Do not leave, Johnie’s bringing you something.’ I swear they can understand me.”

Diana Wise, who runs the White Squirrel Hollow Bed & Breakfast with her husband, Clint, says people come for miles to see the animals.

“A lot of people do not really believe we have white squirrels because they stop at noon and do not see them,” she said. “The best time to see them is 6:30 or 7 in the morning and around 7, 7:30 at night when they’re feeding. They do not like the heat and I think the light hurts their pink eyes.”

Smart used to hunt gray squirrels (“Young squirrel, fried, with biscuits and gravy--you can’t beat it”), but not anymore.

“The squirrels are a hobby, a challenge for me now,” he says. “I guess I’m paying back for all the hunting I used to do.”