Fox squirrels sit at rank seven in Missouri’s record count, noticeably behind their smaller cousin the eastern gray squirrel despite overlapping range. Mingo National Wildlife Refuge and Big Oak Tree State Park’s mature bottomland timber, along with the wooded edges at Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge, are where reports concentrate, likely because fox squirrels favor more open woodland with scattered large trees rather than dense unbroken forest.
Records rise through the year and peak in September and October, well past the spring highs seen in several other Missouri mammals here. That fits fox squirrel foraging around mast crops as acorns and hickory nuts ripen, though the count still measures reporting activity, not squirrel numbers.
All 721 records are GBIF entries with no iNaturalist photos, another sign this figure leans on structured survey data.
