Delaware’s 36 records of the American red squirrel sit at the edge of a very large range map. This species’ core country is the boreal conifer belt of Canada and the Appalachian high country farther south, and Delaware falls at the range’s southeastern tip, in the small stretch of Piedmont hill country around Wilmington.
A conifer specialist at the southern edge of its map
Most of Delaware is Coastal Plain, flat farmland and pine flatwoods that don’t offer the steady cone crop this squirrel depends on. The reports concentrate instead in the Piedmont, the rolling, wooded hill country in the state’s northern corner, where mixed stands of pine and hardwood along the Brandywine and White Clay Creek come closest to the conifer forest the species leans on elsewhere in its range.
A loud, cache-building squirrel wherever it turns up
A red squirrel doesn’t scatter nuts across its territory the way a gray squirrel does. It builds one central cache, a midden, at the base of a favored conifer, and it defends that spot loudly with a rattling, territorial chatter. Delaware’s records peak in April, which lines up with the spring push described across the species’ range, when squirrels come off a quiet winter and turn vocal defending territory and looking for mates.
Status in Delaware
The American red squirrel is native to Delaware, and NatureServe ranks it S3, Vulnerable, in the state. USGS NAS doesn’t list it as nonindigenous here, so its presence reflects a genuine, if marginal, foothold at the southeastern edge of a species whose stronghold lies far to the north.
Full species profile
