The White Squirrels of Trinity Bellwoods

Trinity Bellwoods Park has white squirrels, and they are believed to be albinos. Nobody counts them. They live among the park's ordinary grey and black squirrels, and some of those ordinary-looking squirrels may be carrying the same gene without showing it. That is most of what is documented, and it is more interesting than the legend.

What is actually known

The best reporting on the squirrels is a 2014 piece in the Globe and Mail by Jeff Gray. It makes three points worth keeping straight.

First, they are believed to be albinos. Most white squirrels in other places are white forms of the eastern grey squirrel. The Trinity Bellwoods ones are believed to be the less common albinos, and they are reported to have red eyes.

Second, nobody knows how many there are. City parks officials told the paper they do not track the white squirrel population. Locals believed there were at least two or three.

Third, there may be more than anyone has seen. Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, a squirrel expert at Laurentian University, told the Globe and Mail that there are likely more than two or three. His reasoning was genetic: the park's grey squirrels, many of them black, could carry the albino gene and produce white young.

Later, in 2020, the Friends of Trinity Bellwoods Park reported more than two white squirrels in the park.

Black and grey are the same animal

Before you go looking for white squirrels, look at the ordinary ones. In Trinity Bellwoods many of them are black, and it is natural to assume that black and grey are two different kinds of squirrel.

They are not. Both are the eastern grey squirrel, the same species in two colours. That is why the biologist's point works: a white squirrel does not need white parents. Its parents can be any of the grey or black squirrels running around the lawns, as long as they carry the gene.

How to tell a true albino

A squirrel can look pale without being an albino. The test is the eyes. A true albino has pink or red eyes, because it lacks the pigment that would colour them. A white squirrel with dark eyes is something else.

So if you spot a white squirrel, do not stop at the coat. Get close enough, slowly, to check the eyes.

Where to look

The Friends of Trinity Bellwoods Park reported in 2020 that the white squirrels were seen mostly in the trees south of the Trinity Community Recreation Centre, the brick building on the west side of the park. Scan the trunks and the lower branches there, and give it a few minutes. There is no guarantee. These are wild animals in a fifteen-hectare park, and on some days you will only see grey and black ones.

The same corner of the park is busy with other wildlife. A short walk north-west, near Lobb Avenue and Crawford Street, large flocks of blackbirds, which the people who know the park identify as grackles, come in at sunset to roost from late August into early October.

See them on the walk

The white squirrel trees are stop four of the Trinity Bellwoods walk, a natural-history walk of ten stops over about 1.3 kilometres and around an hour, from the old college gates on Queen Street to a 1915 bridge buried under Crawford Street. You can linger at the squirrel trees as long as you like, because nobody is waiting for you to move on. The walk's real subject is the creek under the park, told in Garrison Creek: The Buried River Under Trinity Bellwoods. For every walk in the city, see the Toronto walking tours guide.

Cover photo: the Trinity College gates on Queen Street, 1914, as reproduced in Trinity Magazine (Autumn 2004). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.