Black, red or dead: How Omaha became a hub for black squirrel scholarship

Three taxidermied penguins preside over Room 426 in Allwine Hall, standing atop a row of metal cabinets in the back corner. The Antarctic birds are locked in an everlasting staring contest with a stuffed hornbill whose craned neck protrudes from a bookcase holding a row of primate skulls. To the students who file into professor James Wilson’s mammalogy class, these are ordinary sights.

What grabs their attention on this Monday afternoon are the short stacks of paper spread neatly across the black lab tables. Today they are receiving an unusual homework assignment with straightforward instructions: fan out across the Omaha metro area and count squirrels. The squirrel census undertaken by Wilson’s students at the University of Nebraska at Omaha has become an annual fall tradition over the past 15 years.



Walking or driving slowly down their assigned streets, the aspiring biologists tally all the squirrels they see, whether black, red or dead. Their surveys have fueled Wilson’s research and built on UNO’s legacy as a hub of black squirrel scholarship. Nearly all of the squirrels living in the Omaha area belong to the same species — the fox squirrel — but a genetic mutation causes some to produce a lot of melanin, making their fur black rather than the usual reddish-brown, Wilson said.

Black squirrels exist in urban pockets across North America , but they have long enjoyed celebrity status in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where they make up roughly half of the local squirrel p.