Last week, while having morning coffee with the gang, on several different occasions, phones were being passed around to give everybody a look at what was captured on camera.

I passed around one of my recent photos of a fisher that was taken by one of our trail cameras. Our cameras have captured fishers on several occasions over the past few years, and on a couple of occasions I have spotted them while out hunting. Surprisingly, there are still a good number of people who have never caught a glimpse of a fisher while out and about. The fisher, a weasel, had supposedly disappeared from Pennsylvania years ago, but in 1994 the Pennsylvania Game Commission began releasing fishers back into Pennsylvania in Sproul State Forest, and today they seem to be fairly well spread over much more of the state. They are very hard to spot since they are very elusive, often traveling at night and usually alone.

Another furry, little critter that entered into the conversation was a squirrel.

Now, what’s so rare about seeing a squirrel? We see them almost every day crossing the road.

Certainly, there’s nothing rare about seeing a gray squirrel, but how about seeing a black squirrel?

Over the years, those of us who have campsites along the Susquehanna River near Montgomery have seen black squirrels fairly often.

Interestingly enough, I once spotted a couple of black squirrels while passing through a housing development in Milton.

The black squirrels are gray squirrels that happen to have extra melanin in their fur that makes them black. I suspect that trait gets passed around in local squirrel communities.

Speaking of seeing a fairly rare black squirrel, how about this sighting?

A number of years ago, while hunting in a nearby woods, I spotted a pure white, true albino red squirrel; it even had pink eyes.

Speaking of seeing white, a friend of mine told me last week that he had a skunk running around in his yard that was mostly all white. We normally expect to see the common black and white striped pattern on a skunk, but that can vary considerably. On a couple of occasions over the years, I have spotted skunks that were much more white with very little black.

While we are on the subject of seeing white fur, another guy at coffee passed around his photo taken while in his tree stand hunting. In the photo is a blotchy colored deer with quite a bit of white showing. That deer was a piebald deer with a rare genetic condition affecting less than one percent of the deer population.

I personally, over my lifetime as a deer hunter, have only ever seen that condition on a couple of occasions. Even rarer, I suspect, is seeing an albino deer.

In Pennsylvania, an albino deer may show up in 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 30,000 births. In a true albino, there is no color, only white, and the eyes are pink, lacking any color.

By the way, another guy at the coffee shop passed around a photo of an 8-foot-tall, hairy creature known as “Bigfoot”. I haven’t seen any lately, but it would certainly make for a very rare sighting!