Douglas’s squirrel, the chickaree, maps California’s conifer belt with 4,988 records. Yosemite National Park leads all sites at 581, and the county list reads like a tour of the state’s forests: Humboldt on the redwood coast at 629, then Mariposa, Tulare, El Dorado, Mono, and Nevada counties marching down the Sierra.
A conifer specialist
The chickaree is a small, fierce tree squirrel that lives almost entirely on conifer seed. Through late summer it cuts green cones by the hundreds, buries them in damp caches called middens, and defends those piles with a rolling chatter that gives it away long before it is seen. Cone-bearing forest is the whole requirement, which is why the record strings through Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Lassen Volcanic, and Redwood national parks and the Tahoe and Stanislaus national forests, and why the dry Central Valley between the two forest belts is nearly blank.
High summer is harvest season
Counts sit low through the Sierra winter, near one hundred a month from January through March, then jump eightfold by June and hold high through October. The squirrel itself shifts gears with the season: cone cutting peaks in late summer, when a working chickaree drops cones and scales all day and its middens grow by the hour. Chickarees do not hibernate, and in the milder redwood belt they stay active and visible through winter, which keeps Humboldt’s records coming in every month.
Status in California
NatureServe has not assigned the species a California rank (SNR), though it is G5 globally. Douglas’s squirrel is native to the state, not listed as nonindigenous by USGS NAS, and not specifically listed under California’s conservation framework.
