The fox squirrel’s Michigan map is a southern Lower Peninsula story. Of 5,468 records, the great bulk sit south of the Bay City line, led by Washtenaw and Ingham counties, in a landscape of farmsteads, oak woodlots, parks, and old neighborhoods where big trees stand apart in open ground.
The squirrel of open woods
Fox squirrels like their forest broken. Where the gray squirrel keeps to connected canopy, the fox squirrel works woodlot edges, savanna-like parkland, and scattered oaks between fields, and it comes to the ground far more readily, loping across open lawn or stubble in a way that makes it the squirrel most often seen away from trees. Records at Asylum Lake, Bay City Recreation Area, and the Edwin S. George Biological Station all sit in that kind of open, oak-dotted country.
Big, rusty, and busy in fall
The largest tree squirrel in Michigan, the fox squirrel wears rusty orange over gray and carries a long, full tail. It stays active all winter, and the record stays busy right through October and November, when it buries acorns and hickory nuts across open ground and retrieves them later, often far from the tree that grew them.
Status in Michigan
NatureServe ranks the fox squirrel S5, Secure, in Michigan, and the species is native to its southern Lower Peninsula range. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
