Eastern Gray Squirrel
Sciurus carolinensis · Mammals
Eastern Gray Squirrel with an acorn
Prospect Park, 25 May 2026
A gray squirrel with an acorn in Prospect Park, the commonest mammal in the city's parks and the reason there are so many oaks in them.
A gray squirrel is a scatter-hoarder, burying thousands of individual nuts across its territory each autumn rather than keeping one store, and relying on a strong spatial memory - not scent alone - to recover most of them. The acorns it fails to relocate are a major reason oaks spread as far as they do. An acorn a squirrel forgets is an oak seedling with a head start.
Eastern Gray Squirrel
Green-Wood Cemetery, 28 September 2025
A gray squirrel paused halfway up a trunk at Green-Wood with the fall canopy for a backdrop. Gray squirrels are the squirrel of the eastern deciduous woods and every park in them, and Green-Wood's are used to foot traffic and camera lenses, which is most of why a shot this close is possible at all.
The tail is doing double duty as counterbalance and, fanned out like this, as a parasol. A genuinely wild gray squirrel keeps far more distance. This is the squirrel that was released in Britain in the 1870s and has since pushed the red out of most of England.
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