Eastern gray squirrel
Sciurus carolinensis
Mammal
Tree squirrel of eastern North American hardwood forests that feeds on the nuts and mast of oaks, hickories, walnut, pecan, and beech. It scatter-hoards surplus nuts in shallow single-seed caches each autumn and recovers them by memory and smell; the substantial fraction never recovered germinates, making the squirrel an effective disperser that aids regeneration of oak and other heavy-seeded trees. It nests in tree cavities and builds leaf-and-twig dreys high in the canopy, so mature nut-bearing trees supply both its food and its shelter.
Conservation
IUCN Red List: Least Concern; abundant and secure across its native range and not federally listed. Native populations are stable; the species is, however, an invasive that displaces native red squirrels where it has been introduced in Europe.
Plants in the catalog
Seed plants · 17
Chestnut mast was historically a dietary staple for the eastern gray squirrel, which both ate and cached the nuts; the loss of the American chestnut removed one of the most reliable, abundant fall mast crops of the eastern forest. On the rare bearing tree today squirrels still take the nuts readily.
Squirrels readily gnaw open and cache fallen walnuts where the tree is planted; English walnut is a Eurasian species rather than part of the native eastern food web, so this is a plausible foraging tie on a cultivated tree rather than a documented native-fauna relationship.
The large, nutritious pine seeds from the fall cones are eaten by squirrels and other small mammals, which cache and disperse them.
Squirrels and other mammals gnaw open and cache the hard pignuts, dispersing the seed in the process.
The eastern gray squirrel both eats and caches acorns; the small, abundant pin oak acorns are a reliable fall-and-winter food and the squirrel's caching helps disperse the species.
Scarlet oak acorns are gathered and cached by eastern gray squirrels and other small mammals; the 2-year acorn cycle drives mast years that feed the wider food web.
Squirrels harvest and cache the acorns; as with all oaks, this both feeds the squirrels and disperses the acorns that escape being eaten.
Squirrels and other small mammals gather and cache the abundant samaras of female trees.
Range
Native across the eastern United States to just west of the Mississippi River and north into southeastern Canada.