Southern flying squirrel records in Iowa are few, just 4 since 2000, all from Mississippi River counties on the state’s eastern edge. Three of them come from Dubuque and Clayton counties in the northeastern corner, where the Driftless Area’s steep, unglaciated bluffs still carry unbroken timber, and the fourth from Scott County farther downriver.
Iowa’s one stretch of forest built for a glider
A southern flying squirrel needs mature trees close enough together to glide between, plus old woodpecker cavities to den in, and almost nowhere else in Iowa offers that anymore. Row-crop agriculture replaced most of the state’s original woodland generations ago, but the Driftless Area’s steep, rocky terrain, including the bluffs above the Mississippi around the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, Yellow River State Forest, and the river-bluff parks nearby, was too rugged to plow. That ruggedness is what kept enough connected canopy standing for a species that rarely touches open ground.
A nocturnal animal that’s easy to miss
This squirrel glides and forages entirely after dark, so most Iowans who share its woods never see it. That nocturnal habit, more than any real scarcity, likely explains why occurrence databases hold so few Iowa records. A species can go undetected for years in the exact patch of forest where it’s actually resident.
Status in Iowa
NatureServe ranks the southern flying squirrel S4, apparently secure, in Iowa. It’s not listed as nonindigenous by USGS NAS, so it’s native to its Iowa range, and its four records, from February, April, August, and September, are too few to show a season, though this is a species that doesn’t migrate and stays active through Iowa winters night after night.
