New York holds 229 records of southern flying squirrels, and Long Island alone accounts for the densest cluster of reports. That’s not where the state’s flying squirrels necessarily concentrate; it’s where a nocturnal glider is easiest to find and photograph.
Long Island’s oak woods, not the Adirondack high country
Southern flying squirrels need mature oak and hickory forest, the kind that produces the mast crop they cache and the tree cavities they nest in, and Long Island’s oak-hickory woodlots supply both close to where people already look. The Adirondack Park reports sit at the edge of the species’ New York range for a different reason: this is where the cold-hardy northern flying squirrel takes over as the more likely species in higher, colder forest. The two species meet and even overlap along parts of the northern Northeast, so an Adirondack sighting is worth a closer look at size and belly-fur color before assuming which flying squirrel it is.
A glider that hoards and huddles
This is a nocturnal animal built for the dark, gliding between trunks on a skin membrane rather than moving across open ground. It caches nuts, seeds, and acorns for winter, rounds out its diet with fungi, insects, and the odd bird egg, and in the coldest months several animals will pack into one tree cavity to share body heat. That habit of denning together, combined with a life spent almost entirely after dark, is a big part of why the species turns up in New York’s records far less often than its actual local numbers.
Status in New York
NatureServe ranks the southern flying squirrel S5, secure, and it’s native across the state; USGS NAS doesn’t list it as an introduced species in New York.
