Only one mammal out-records the eastern gray squirrel in West Virginia’s atlas. Its 1,130 records run across 48 counties, heaviest in Monongalia, Kanawha, and Hampshire, with New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, Monongahela National Forest, Coopers Rock State Forest, and Kanawha State Forest leading the named places.
Built around the mast crop
West Virginia is hardwood country, and the gray squirrel is a hardwood animal. Acorns, hickory nuts, walnuts, and beechnuts make up the core of its diet, gathered and scatter-hoarded one nut at a time against the winter. It nests in tree cavities where it can and builds bulky leaf dreys where it cannot, and females raise two litters a year, one in late winter and another in early summer. Where oaks and hickories stand, in ridge forests, town parks, or wooded yards, gray squirrels are usually close.
Two pulses a year
West Virginia’s counts crest twice. The first and larger wave runs through March and April, when the leafless canopy leaves squirrels exposed and the late-winter litter is newly out of the nest. A second rise comes in September and October, the height of the caching season, when squirrels spend long stretches on the ground burying the fall mast.
Status in West Virginia
NatureServe ranks the eastern gray squirrel S5, Secure, in West Virginia, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
