The golden-mantled ground squirrel is a familiar animal of Arizona’s high conifer forests, though it keeps entirely to the state’s cool northern and eastern highlands. Open occurrence databases hold 495 records for it in Arizona, nearly all of them iNaturalist photos.
A squirrel of the high country
This is a mountain animal. It needs the pine and mixed-conifer forest that grows on the Colorado Plateau and the ranges of the east, so its records concentrate in Coconino and Apache counties, around the San Francisco Peaks, the Mogollon Rim, the Grand Canyon rim, and the White Mountains. It is absent from the low deserts that hold so many of the state’s other ground squirrels, which is exactly why it shares so little ground with them.
Not a chipmunk
Its name comes from the coppery mantle of fur across its head and shoulders. A single bold white stripe, edged in black, runs down each side of the back, and, unlike a true chipmunk, its face carries no stripes at all. It is also chunkier and larger than any chipmunk, a solid squirrel that forages on the ground for seeds, nuts, and fungi.
The hibernating season
Records climb through the summer and fall to almost nothing in the cold months. That winter silence is hibernation. The squirrel fattens through the warm season, then retreats to a burrow and sleeps out the mountain winter, so its absence from the record from late autumn onward reflects an animal underground, not one that has left.
Full species profile
