The eastern gray squirrel’s Nebraska map is a study in hardwoods. Of 137 records, nearly all sit in a tight band of counties along the Missouri River, Sarpy, Cass, Richardson, Otoe, and Douglas, where the state’s richest oak, hickory, and walnut woods survive between the cropland and the river.
A tree squirrel in a grassland state
Gray squirrels live on tree mast, and in Nebraska the mast grows along the rivers. Bottomland oaks, hickories, and walnuts line the Missouri and the lower Platte, which is why the Platte River corridor holds more named-site records than anywhere else in the state and why the hardwood bluffs of Indian Cave and Ponca state parks suit the species so well. Away from those wooded corridors the open prairie belongs to other mammals, and the squirrel’s map simply stops.
Autumn’s busiest season
Gray squirrels raise two litters a year, one in late winter and another in summer, and Nebraska’s counts trace both peaks. Sightings rise in May as spring-born young disperse, then crest in October, when every squirrel in the woods is on the ground burying acorns and hickory nuts against the winter. They do not hibernate, and through the cold months they revisit those buried stores, found by smell under the snow.
Status in Nebraska
NatureServe ranks the eastern gray squirrel S4, Apparently Secure, in Nebraska, and the species is native to the state, part of the river-corridor hardwood community at the western edge of its range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
