American red squirrels show up in 1,084 Pennsylvania records, one of the more frequently recorded mammals on the state’s list. Records that dense usually point to a noisy, visible animal rather than a rare one, and a chattering red squirrel in a stand of pines is hard to miss.
Pine country, not farm country
Records for this species concentrate wherever Pennsylvania still grows conifers. The clearest cluster sits around Pymatuning State Park’s pine plantations in the state’s glaciated northwestern corner, and more broadly through the hemlock ravines and mixed conifer stands of the Appalachian Plateau’s northern tier. Records thin out fast across the hardwood-and-farmland Piedmont in the state’s southeast, where the cone crop this squirrel depends on simply isn’t there.
Living off a stockpile of cones
A red squirrel spends its summer and fall cutting green conifer cones and hauling them to one central pile near a favorite perch, often the same spot used across several winters. That midden is the difference between getting through a Pennsylvania winter and going hungry once snow buries the forest floor. It rounds out the diet with mushrooms, bark, sap, and the occasional bird egg, and it defends that stockpile alone, driving off almost anything that gets close, including other red squirrels.
Records rise through spring
Records climb steadily from late winter and stay high through the late-spring and early-summer months, when young squirrels leave the nest and adults spend more time above ground gathering food and defending territory. Numbers fall off again by midsummer as Pennsylvania’s forests grow dense with leaf cover.
Status in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania treats the American red squirrel as native, and NatureServe ranks it S5, secure, at the state level. It isn’t listed as nonindigenous by USGS, in keeping with a species that has held its conifer strongholds across the state’s northern forests.
Full species profile
