North Dakota’s 111 eastern gray squirrel records cluster hard along the state’s eastern rim, with Cass and Ward counties holding two thirds of the total. The map traces the Red River valley’s hardwood corridors and the tree canopy of well-planted towns, the northwestern edge of a species centered far to the east.
A squirrel that needs mature hardwoods
Gray squirrels live on the seeds of oaks, walnuts, and other hardwoods, burying nuts one by one in fall and recovering many of them later by smell. In a state where continuous deciduous forest is scarce, they hold to the floodplain woods along the Red and Sheyenne rivers and to mature city parks and neighborhoods where planted trees supply the same mast. The Sheyenne National Grassland, the Pembina Gorge, and Icelandic State Park mark the kind of wooded pockets where they turn up, and their gray coat and white-fringed tail separate them from the larger, rustier fox squirrel that shares some of the same towns.
Two working seasons
Active all winter in dreys and tree cavities, gray squirrels show two reporting peaks that match their working calendar. June brings fresh leaf cover and young squirrels out of the nest, and September into October is caching season, when animals spend long hours on the ground cutting and burying the year’s nut crop.
Status in North Dakota
NatureServe has not assigned the eastern gray squirrel a state rank in North Dakota, listing it as SNR, Unranked. The species is native to the state, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
