Indiana’s 2,462 gray squirrel records trace the state’s hardwoods, from the ravine forests of Turkey Run State Park and the big woods of Brown County State Park north to the wooded dune country at Indiana Dunes National Park. Tippecanoe County leads the county totals by a wide margin.
An animal built for mast
Gray squirrels live on tree seeds, acorns, hickory nuts, walnuts, and beech mast, and they make their living by scatter hoarding, burying thousands of nuts one at a time each fall and recovering them later by smell and memory. The caches they fail to retrieve plant the next generation of hardwoods, which makes the squirrel a quiet partner in keeping Indiana’s oak and hickory woods going.
The autumn rush
Reports crest sharply in September and October, when squirrels are on the ground burying mast and cutting hickory nuts in the canopy overhead, the most visible weeks of their year. They stay active through winter, leaving their leaf nests and tree cavities on mild days to dig up buried food, while counts slacken in midsummer, when food hangs everywhere above ground and the squirrels keep to the shade of the canopy.
Status in Indiana
NatureServe ranks the eastern gray squirrel S5, Secure, in Indiana, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
