The UF/IFAS Leon County Extension Office and I have been receiving a lot of calls lately about squirrels.
This is no surprise, as Tallahassee is a city within a forest, and the most common herbivore in the area is the eastern gray squirrel ( Sciurus carolinensis ). Our only other squirrel species is the fox squirrel ( Sciurus niger ), but this much larger squirrel is far less abundant in our urban forest.
The eastern gray squirrel is native to eastern North America but has unfortunately been introduced to other parts of the world, including South Africa and Europe, where it is considered an exotic pest. Though currently abundant in our urban areas, human predation and habitat destruction through deforestation once drastically reduced their populations in parts of the U.S., to the point where they were nearly absent from Illinois by 1900.
Gray squirrels shape our forests in many ways. First and foremost, they have a significant impact by burying seeds like acorns, making them essential natural forest regenerators. They harvest and store tree nuts in various ways, especially by burying them in caches in the ground.