The rock squirrel is a common sight across Colorado’s rocky country. Open occurrence databases hold 1,101 records for it here, 756 of them iNaturalist photos, most drawn from the canyon-cut western slope and the southern Front Range foothills.
Where rock squirrels turn up in Colorado
This is the largest ground squirrel in the region, a mottled gray-brown rodent with a long bushy tail that it flips and jerks as it perches on a boulder. True to the name, it lives where the rock is: canyon walls, talus slopes, cliff bases, dry-stacked walls, and road cuts. The records track that habitat exactly. Southwestern Colorado leads, with Montezuma County and the sandstone country around Mesa Verde National Park at the top, followed by the Grand Valley canyons of Mesa and Montrose counties and the Front Range foothills of El Paso, Pueblo, and Boulder counties. Colorado sits near the northern limit of a mainly southwestern species, so the high mountains and the eastern plains hold few.
The winter gap in the record
Rock squirrels are active by day and easy to watch through the warm months, sunning on rocks and stuffing their cheeks with seeds, berries, and green shoots. Then they largely vanish. In Colorado’s cold they retreat to burrows dug among the rocks and drop into torpor, a hibernation-like slowdown that carries them through the leanest weeks. The animal that dominates a summer boulder field is simply underground for much of the winter, which is why the record thins to almost nothing in the cold months and rebuilds as the squirrels re-emerge.
Status in Colorado
The rock squirrel is native to Colorado and secure here, ranked S5 by NatureServe. Colorado National Monument, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Mesa Verde are all reliable places to find one.
Full species profile
