Eastern Fox Squirrel

About the Eastern Fox Squirrel

The big rusty squirrel of Texas oak country, half again the size of a gray squirrel and dressed in warm orange-buff below. Fox squirrels earned their name from that foxy color, and a backlit one on a winter branch, tail flared, is as handsome as any mammal in the state.

They spend more time on the ground than their cousins, loping between pecans with the thick tail flowing behind, and they are built for the open park-like woodlands of the Texas heartland - oak groves, pecan bottoms, and the neighborhoods that grew up inside them. Where forests are dense and closed, gray squirrels take over; where the trees space out, the fox squirrel rules.

Fall is the busy season, when each squirrel buries hundreds of acorns and pecans in scattered caches, relocating them later by memory and smell. The forgotten ones become trees, which makes the fox squirrel - like the Blue Jay - one of the great accidental foresters.

Litters arrive in late winter and again in summer, raised in leaf nests and tree cavities. A kit's first clumsy weeks outside the den, all oversized feet and bad judgment, are a photographer's gift.