South Dakota’s fox squirrel record, 479 strong, hugs the wooded east. Brookings and Minnehaha counties together account for more than two hundred reports, with smaller clusters running west along the Missouri River through sites like Farm Island, Lewis and Clark Recreation Area, and the recreation lands below Lake Oahe.
The largest tree squirrel, at home near people
The fox squirrel is the biggest tree squirrel in North America, with a long, often rusty-tinged tail and a deliberate, ground-covering gait. It favors open, park-like deciduous woods: cottonwood river bottoms, mature shelterbelts, oak and walnut plantings. It has also settled comfortably into town parks and farmsteads, and sites like Oakwood Lakes Recreation Area and Big Sioux capture that mix of bottomland timber and mowed edge.
A scatter-hoarder with a fall rush
Rather than caching food in one place, a fox squirrel buries acorns and walnuts one at a time across its home range and digs them up later. Records stay steady all year, since the species neither hibernates nor migrates, but they peak from April through June and rise again in October, when the nut harvest has squirrels cutting and burying in earnest.
Status in South Dakota
NatureServe ranks the fox squirrel S5, Secure, in South Dakota, and the species is native to the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
