You may have seen a grey squirrel, you may have seen a black squirrel – but both together?

Gambolling in a Hertfordshire back garden is a sight to make anyone sit up and take notice – a grey squirrel may be a regular visitor, a black squirrel is rarer, but the reader who captured this brief snatch of film has never seen both at the same time.
black squirrelblack squirrel
black squirrel

And yet they seem perfectly happy together. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as experts say they are the same species, apart from their colouring, and there’s nothing to stop them breeding.

Black squirrels aren’t an everyday sight, but they’re not as rare as you might think.

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They’re regularly spotted in Hertfordshire and have been around for more than 100 years.

black squirrelblack squirrel
black squirrel

The best known colony is on the other side of the county in Letchworth, where they even named a town centre pub after the unusual animal, but they’re no stranger to the Boxmoor area and other parts of Hemel Hempstead.

And naturalists say that the black strain – the same species as the much more common grey variety, with distinctive colouring caused by a mutant gene – is spreading.

Last year scientists from Anglia Ruskin University launched a study to discover just how widespread they were. It’s believed that the first black squirrel escaped into the wild from a private menagerie in Bedfordshire in 1912 and there have been sightings reported in Beds, Herts and Cambridgeshire

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Lead researcher Helen McRobie said: “Just a few black squirrels were released in one location, whereas the grey squirrels were released in several locations all over the country.

“Although we know black squirrels are spreading, as yet we don’t have evidence that they are living elsewhere in the British Isles.

“We want to understand if the blacks are, in fact, spreading faster than the greys.”

The team hope to use new samples from roadkill or planned culls to reveal the genetic secrets of two of Britain’s most successful invading mammals.

Have you spotted a black squirrel in your back garden? Did you capture the moment on film? Let us know, email [email protected]