With 3,687 records, Douglas’s squirrel ranks among the most documented mammals in Oregon, and its map is a map of conifer forest. Multnomah, Deschutes, Tillamook, and Clatsop counties lead, spanning the Cascades, the Coast Range, and the wet forest in between.
The forest’s resident scold
This small squirrel with the rusty orange underside lives on conifer seed, cutting green cones from the canopy and peeling them at favorite feeding stumps that grow into piles of scales called middens. It defends those larders loudly, and its sharp, rolling chatter is often a hiker’s first clue that the squirrel is near. Oregon’s records pile up in exactly that country: Deschutes and Siuslaw national forests lead among named places, with Crater Lake National Park, Newberry National Volcanic Monument, and Mount Hood Wilderness close behind.
A harvest that never fully stops
Douglas’s squirrels do not hibernate, though winter storms keep them treed up and out of sight. Cone cutting peaks in late summer, when the animals work frantically to cache cones in damp middens that keep the scales closed and the seed fresh, and Oregon’s record follows the same arc, high from June through a September crest before sliding back through the wet winter.
Status in Oregon
NatureServe ranks Douglas’s squirrel S5, Secure, in Oregon, and the species is native to the state’s conifer forests. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
