Washington’s occurrence databases hold 860 American red squirrel records, compiled from iNaturalist and GBIF, most frequently recorded in the state’s drier eastern conifer belt. Records track where people have looked, not how many squirrels are actually in the woods.
The eastern squirrel, not the coastal one
Washington actually hosts two red squirrels that rarely overlap. The Douglas squirrel holds the wetter west-side and Cascade-crest forests, while the American red squirrel takes over east of the Cascades, in the drier ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer belt running from the Okanogan highlands and Selkirk-Kettle country down through the Blue Mountains and the forested pockets scattered across the Palouse, including the timber around Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge and Colville National Forest. The two squirrels are close relatives doing the same job in different rainfall zones.
Building a midden before the snow
Reports climb through summer, peak in July, and spike again in October before dropping off in November. That fits a squirrel that spends the warm months feeding and defending a territory, then shifts hard into cutting and hoarding conifer cones each fall. A squirrel’s cone cache, called a midden, can build up over years and anchors the same patch of forest the animal defends, loudly, against nearly anything that comes close.
Status in Washington
NatureServe ranks the American red squirrel S5, Secure, in Washington, and USGS NAS doesn’t list it as nonindigenous here. It’s treated as native across its eastern Washington range, one of the more frequently recorded small mammals in the drier conifer belt it calls home.
Full species profile
