The Black Squirrel

In considering the value of Lake Forest's arboral splendor for this week's assignment when set against its artificiality, I immediately thought of the black squirrel. I had seen a couple around campus in the past week, and remembered vaguely hearing that they were very rare, and Lake Forest was one of the only places they could be found. Surely, I thought, Lake Forest earned some slack for providing an ecosystem for such a rare creature.

. . .That was before I decided to do a little research. I fed the terms "black squirrel Lake Forest" into google, and was immediately rewarded with this little entry from the Chicago Sun-Times:

"My friend Joel Greenberg, author of the must-have book, A Natural History of the Chicago Region, once cracked wise, as he is apt to do, with me when I asked him about the spread of black squirrels. 'I don't have a specific response except to say that black is an increasingly popular color among gray squirrels. Black gray squirrels used to be restricted to the North Shore (Wilmette north to Lake Forest) but now are showing up more widely.'"

Apparently the black squirrels are everywhere now, and Lake Forest isn't so unique anymore. I'm going to need a new justification.