The eastern gray squirrel is the most thoroughly recorded mammal in Alabama’s atlas, 4,844 records reaching all 67 counties, with Lee, Jefferson, and Madison counties accounting for the heaviest concentrations and wooded neighborhoods reporting almost as reliably as any forest.
Built around mast and canopy
A gray squirrel lives where oaks, hickories, and beech drop nuts and where the canopy connects overhead. Alabama holds that habitat from the upland oak woods of Oak Mountain and Cheaha state parks to the pine-hardwood edges of Conecuh National Forest and the maritime woods of Dauphin Island. Each autumn a squirrel buries thousands of nuts one at a time across its home ground and later recovers much of that cache by smell, a memory-and-nose system that lets it eat all winter without ever leaving its trees. Leaf nests and tree cavities give it shelter year-round.
Two peaks on the calendar
Counts spike hard in April, when breeding chases and fresh foraging keep squirrels visible all day, then climb again through October and November as the mast crop falls and caching runs at full pace. Gray squirrels do not hibernate, and even midwinter records stay high, since a sunny January morning still brings them down to dig.
Status in Alabama
NatureServe ranks the eastern gray squirrel S5, Secure, in Alabama, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
