Eastern Kansas is where the gray squirrel’s world ends. Of 922 Kansas records, Douglas and Johnson counties alone hold the overwhelming majority, with Leavenworth and Wyandotte close behind, and the record thins to scattered reports west of the Flint Hills. This is a hardwood-forest squirrel, and in Kansas the hardwoods run out.
Tied to the mast trees
A gray squirrel lives where oaks and hickories drop acorns and nuts, and where a closed canopy lets it travel without touching the ground. In Kansas that means the bottomland timber along the Missouri and Kansas rivers and the wooded drainages of the eastern tier, plus the shaded neighborhoods and campuses that grow old trees inside the same towns. Karlyle Woods and the Kansas Ecological Reserves hold the named-site records, all east-side woodlands. Through winter it shelters in leaf nests wedged into the canopy or in tree cavities when it can find one.
A calendar written in acorns
The Kansas record peaks in April and May, when squirrels are on the ground digging up cached nuts and the season’s first young leave the nest, and it rises again in October, the height of the autumn caching push. A gray squirrel buries acorns one at a time across its home ground and finds them later by smell and memory, a habit that makes it both a seed predator and a tree planter. The species is active in every month here, midday in winter, mornings and evenings in summer.
Status in Kansas
NatureServe ranks the eastern gray squirrel S5, Secure, in Kansas, and it is native to its Kansas range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
