South Dakota’s occurrence databases hold 31 northern flying squirrel records, most concentrated around Mount Rushmore National Memorial and the surrounding Black Hills forest, a small count that fits both a genuinely scarce animal and one that’s active mostly after dark.
An isolated outpost, far from the rest of the range
Northern flying squirrels mostly range across a continuous band of northern forest from Alaska through the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, and the Northeast. The Black Hills squirrels sit apart from all of that, an isolated pocket of cool conifer forest hundreds of miles from the nearest connected range, holding on here the way a handful of other high mountain forests do farther west.
A forest floor connection that depends on old growth
These squirrels eat mushrooms and underground fungi as much as seeds and buds, and they need standing dead wood, decaying logs, and old tree cavities to den in, habitat that thins out fast in younger, more actively managed timber. Because they’re active mostly after dark, most South Dakota records come from targeted trapping and survey work rather than casual sightings, which fits the July concentration in the data, the peak of the state’s summer fieldwork season rather than the squirrel’s own peak activity.
Status in South Dakota
USGS NAS doesn’t list the northern flying squirrel as nonindigenous in South Dakota, and NatureServe ranks it S3, vulnerable, in the state. It’s native to the isolated pocket of Black Hills forest it depends on here.
Full species profile
