Forget reds and greys, the all-white squirrelis no longer a secret

You may have to look twice, but yes, it's an all-white squirrel. This albino resident of the gardens of the village of Wye, in Kent, has been causing a stir, and proved elusive to people trying to photograph him – or her – until the recruitment consultant Peter Low caught the creature on camera after a six-month wait.

It's certainly an eye-catching animal, but actually, not as rare as you might think. Albinism, the lack of the pigment melanin in the skin, hair and eyes, is a developmental disorder that occurs in nearly all types of vertebrate organisms – mammals (including people), birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians.

Squirrels are among the most frequently seen albino mammals, not least because they are widespread, visible and active during the day, but many of Britain's familiar wild animals appear in all-white forms. Deer are perhaps the most stunning: they can appear so ghostly that in Celtic and other mythologies they were considered messengers from another word; if you saw one it was said to presage a profound change in your life. They are also identified with unicorns.

A white stag has been seen recently on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. Its location is being kept hidden to protect it from poachers. Last autumn, a similar white stag that had roamed the borders of Devon and Cornwall for nearly a decade, with his existence a closely guarded secret, was found shot dead and decapitated.

The stag's head, with its ornate antlers, was taken as a hunting trophy, and possibly sold for thousands of pounds.

But more homely creatures are also found in albino forms. They include badgers, foxes, and even moles: The Handbook of British Mammals says that besides their normal dark colouring, moles can be "albino, cream, apricot, rust, piebald and silver grey". Even white bats are occasionally seen.

Tony Mitchell-Jones, the senior mammal ecologist at Natural England, once caught an albino noctule bat while studying a roost at March, Cambridgeshire. "I saw this white bat fly out, and amazingly, we caught it in a net," he said. "It was quite something. It had white fur with a bit of a brown tinge and pink membranes, although it had dark eye. We put a ring on it to see if we could catch it later, but we never did." That may be because being albino, or even partly so, is no great help to survival. "Albino creatures do tend to stand out in a crowd for predators that hunt visually," he said. This is certainly the case with birds, where all-white is an appearance that can be observed in almost all bird families, from penguins to owls. In falconry, trained falcons and hawks are likely to pick out a white pigeon in a flock because of its conspicuousness, and sometimes albino birds can find themselves harassed by their own species.

The recessive gene which causes it all occurs also in fish, amphibians and reptiles. Albino turtles, alligators and snakes have been found; albino frogs are not uncommon. And of course, it occurs in humans: about one in 17,000 people is thought to exhibit albinism in some form. It cannot be "cured" as a condition, but some things can be done to improve the quality of life of people affected, such as protecting the eyes from bright lights and protecting the skin from strong sunlight.

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