The Arizona gray squirrel is a canyon specialist found almost nowhere but the mountains of the Southwest. Its 2,908 Arizona records, most of them iNaturalist photos, come overwhelmingly from the wooded sky-island canyons of the state’s southeastern corner.
Life in the sycamore canyons
Unlike the ponderosa-loving Abert’s squirrel, this one keeps to the shady broadleaf bottoms: sycamore, walnut, and oak lining the perennial creeks that thread the Sky Islands. It harvests walnuts, acorns, and pine seeds and caches them against winter. Santa Cruz and Cochise counties, home to Madera and Ramsey canyons and the wider Coronado National Forest, hold nearly all of its records, and the squirrel thins out fast wherever the canyon forest does.
A quiet, grizzled gray
This is a larger and plainer animal than its lookalikes: a grizzled gray coat, a clean white belly, a long gray-and-white tail, and no ear tufts to speak of. It is shy and easily overlooked, slipping through the canopy rather than scolding from a trunk, so many sightings come from patient observers working a single canyon.
Status in Arizona
The Arizona gray squirrel is native to the state and ranked S4, apparently secure, by NatureServe. Its overall world range is small enough, confined to a handful of Southwestern and northern Mexican mountains, that the species is globally listed as data deficient, which makes Arizona’s canyon populations an outsized share of everything known about it.
Full species profile
