With 6,774 records, the eastern gray squirrel sits near the very top of Tennessee’s mammal atlas, its sightings reaching from Great Smoky Mountains National Park through Radnor Lake and Cherokee National Forest into every settled corner of the state.
A citizen of the oak and hickory
The gray squirrel is a mast animal, built around the acorns and hickory nuts of hardwood forest. It holds wherever trees are mature enough to bear heavy nut crops, whether that forest is a national park cove or the treed neighborhoods of Knoxville, Nashville, and Chattanooga, whose home counties of Knox, Davidson, and Hamilton lead the state record. It dens in tree cavities when it can and builds bulky leaf nests, called dreys, when it cannot.
Two peaks, one for birth and one for work
Gray squirrels raise a litter late in winter and often another in summer, and Tennessee’s record lifts hardest in March and April, when new young squirrels and breeding chases make the animal conspicuous. A second rise comes in October and November, as squirrels work overtime burying nuts, a scatter-hoarding habit that plants more trees than the squirrel ever finds again.
Status in Tennessee
NatureServe ranks the eastern gray squirrel S5, Secure, in Tennessee. The species is native throughout its Tennessee range, and USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
