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Fox Squirrel
Also called: Cat Squirrel.
Images coming soon.
- Length
- 23.50 inches.
- Description
- The largest of the true squirrels, with very long bushy tail. Colour grizzly or yellowish gray, the hairs banded with black, and with more or less rusty tints on the upper surface; underparts pale, ferruginous to nearly white; tail rusty beneath, bordered with black. Exact colours decidedly variable in different individuals.
- Range
- Mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, northward through Pennsylvania and New Jersey to central New York. Now nearly extinct through most of its range. Represented to the West and South by related varieties. (See below).
- Range
- Mississippi Valley, north to South Dakota.
- Range
- Pine woods of Florida, west to Louisiana and north to Virginia, east of the mountains.
Fox squirrels are big vigorous fellows, adapting their habits to the kind of woods they live in. Those found among hard woods live very much as the gray squirrels do in summer, but are generally less provident in the matter of preparing for the cold season, preferring rather to avoid those regions where the snow lies deep for any length of time and depending for food on whatever they may find from day to day, scratching among fallen leaves for acorns and nuts, and when these fail, living on the buds of trees as best they may.
In rough weather they keep close at home in their hollow trees, choosing to go hungry rather than face the cold. In warm weather they gather wild fruit, berries and mushrooms and go into the corn fields as soon as the ears have reached the milky stage. Among the southern pines they make large nests of Spanish moss in the tree-tops, and here they bring the cones which they cut off, just as the red squirrels do the cones of the white pines in the North, biting off the scales in order to get at the seeds in a similar manner. The scales scattered about the foot of their tree often betray them to the squirrel-hunter.
A full-grown fox squirrel, owing to his size and strength, has probably little to fear from hawks, though a red-tailed hawk might not fear to attack one on occasion, or a goshawk when driven south by an unusually hard winter. The fox squirrels' worst enemies are undoubtedly the wild cat, gray fox and raccoon.
In hardwoods fox squirrels build nests of dry leaves, a large bunch frequently conspicuously bright yellow; the entrance to a warmly lined nest of broken up leaves is a small hole in the side. At other times they live in holes in trees, using dry grass and strips of soft bark for a lining.
They are much hunted as an article of food, being well flavoured and heavy, but it requires skilful watching to kill many of them.
In Florida the "crackers" look for scattered chips of the pine cones at the foot of each tree and, finding them recently dropped, hide near-by and wait patiently for hours to get a shot.
Varieties of the Fox Squirrel
1. Northern Fox Squirrel. Sciurus rufiventer neglects (Gray). Description and range as above.
2. Western Fox Squirrel. S. rufiventer Geoffroy. Similar, but generally partially black, sometimes all black above and rufous below, or mottled above and black beneath. Very variable.
3. Southern Fox Squirrel. S. niger (Linnaeus). Larger than either of the above (25.50 inches). Colours variable, generally entirely black or black and buff above and reddish buff below. Ears and nose always white, which is never the case with other species.