The Mexican fox squirrel reaches the United States only in the pine-oak mountains of Arizona’s far southeastern corner. Effectively all of its 708 Arizona records, most of them iNaturalist photos, come from a single range: the Chiricahua Mountains of Cochise County.
A squirrel of the Chiricahuas
This large, rust-toned squirrel is a Madrean sky-island specialist. In the US it lives almost entirely in the Chiricahuas and a few neighboring ranges, in the pine-oak and canyon woodland where it gathers acorns, pinyon and pine seeds, walnuts, and fruit. The Coronado National Forest and Chiricahua National Monument account for nearly every sighting, and beyond that pocket of mountains the species simply does not occur north of the border.
Rusty and hard to mistake
A big squirrel washed in rusty orange, deepest on the belly and tail, with a plain head and no ear tufts. Within its tiny US range there is little to confuse it with, since the Arizona gray squirrel keeps to canyons farther west and the tassel-eared Abert’s holds to open ponderosa.
Status in Arizona
Because its entire US population is squeezed into one corner of one state, NatureServe ranks the Mexican fox squirrel S2, imperiled, in Arizona, even though the species remains secure across its much larger Mexican range. That narrow foothold makes the Chiricahua population a genuine specialty for anyone tracking the state’s mammals.
Full species profile
