Spotted Ground Squirrel

About the Spotted Ground Squirrel

The Spotted Ground Squirrel is one of the more easily overlooked mammals in Texas - a small, slim, pale brownish ground squirrel sprinkled with faint squarish white spots across the back, built low to the ground with a thin tail. It is far more subtle than the boldly striped thirteen-lined ground squirrel and blends beautifully into pale sand.

It is a specialist of sandy country - dunes, beach ridges, and sparse sandy grassland - where it digs burrows at the base of vegetation and darts between clumps of grass, pausing upright to scan for hawks and coyotes. Seeds, green shoots, and insects make up the diet, and in the hottest and coldest stretches of the year the squirrels simply stay below ground.

In Texas, Spotted Ground Squirrels range across the sandy soils of the western half of the state and down the barrier islands of the coast, where the dune country behind Gulf beaches suits them perfectly - a coastal-dunes mammal to watch for between shorebird flocks.