A RARE white squirrel has become a daily visitor to a Cotswold couple’s garden – putting the rest of its grey family in the shade.

Colin and Maggie Davison were amazed when they saw the pure white animal feeding alongside its four siblings in their garden at Winchcombe.

The couple started feeding squirrels three years ago and one female has become a regular visitor, bringing its young every spring.

But this year the mother startled Colin and Maggie when she arrived with her latest brood of five babies – one of them snowy white.

Colin said: "We thought at first he might be an albino, possibly weaker than the others, but he’s not. He has black eyes and has proved a toughie, able to see off his brothers and sisters to get acrobatically to the ball of nuts on our feeding station."

Albino squirrels – pure white with pink eyes – are seen in the UK from time to time but the fact that Colin and Maggie’s visitor has normal eye colouring suggests it has a condition called leucism, which involves a partial loss of body pigmentation that does not affect the eyes.