the blacks are pretty aggressive and when they begins moving into an area they seem to run most of the others out. they first started showing up in W MI 25 or 30 years ago as far as I know. the first I saw were in a roadside park near Luddington. Now they are pretty well distributed all over the western part of the state and have moved east in many areas. Have you ever seen the White Squirrels in Olney Illinois? I think there is another substantial group in a town in Iowa as well.
I've always wanted to see one of those big old Ohio river valley squirrels the pioneers used to shoot. the one that "a brace of them'd feed a family" they must have been a LOT bigger than any squirrel we have around now. Of course there were also a LOT of hunger pioneer families
A few years back a group of us traditional bowhunters were sitting around a campfire BSing about the big-buck GrandSlam trophy artists and decided we needed to figure out a "Grand Slam of Squirrels". I did some research and found out it'd take a huge and expensive bunch of travel and a bunch of trophies to collect one of each. There are near 40 different ones as near as I can remember, including a species in India that gets up to 3 or 4 feet long. Then there is that purple one that made the news last week.
I've never built a "squirrel rifle" always bigger bore stuff. the pictured example is really elegant. What would be considered a classic Using-type squirrel rifle, not a high art version?