The eastern gray squirrel is the most-recorded mammal in Louisiana’s atlas, with 4006 records and East Baton Rouge, Jefferson, Orleans, and St. Tammany parishes leading the count. It is as much a backyard and park animal as a forest one, as records from State Capitol Park in downtown Baton Rouge make plain.
Built for hardwood mast
Gray squirrels live on acorns, hickory nuts, and pecans, burying thousands of them in scattered caches to carry through winter. That diet ties them to mature hardwoods with an open understory, which in Louisiana means bottomland oak flats like those in Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, the hardwood pockets of Kisatchie National Forest, and the old shade trees of towns and campuses across the state.
Two peaks in the calendar
Louisiana records spike twice, in April and again in October. Gray squirrels raise two litters a year, one in late winter and one in summer, and the spring surge catches newly independent young animals foraging hard. The fall surge is caching season, when a squirrel may spend the whole day on the ground burying mast and becomes nearly impossible to overlook.
Status in Louisiana
NatureServe ranks the eastern gray squirrel S5, Secure, in Louisiana, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
