Rock Squirrel

About the Rock Squirrel

A big, grizzled ground squirrel that lives where the ground stands on end - canyon walls, boulder fields, rimrock, and the stone landscaping of Hill Country subdivisions. Mottled gray-brown with a long, lightly bushed tail, it looks like a tree squirrel that took up mountaineering, and it climbs nearly as well as one.

Rock Squirrels den in burrows dug under boulders and ledges, and a colony's sentinel system is half the experience of watching them: a lookout on the highest rock, upright as a bowling pin, whistling a sharp alarm at hawks, snakes, and photographers alike. The species has a documented history of mobbing rattlesnakes - adults harass and sand-kick them, and their blood carries partial resistance to the venom.

The menu is whatever the season offers: mesquite beans, juniper berries, prickly pear fruit eaten spines-and-all, insects, and the occasional egg. In Texas they range from the Trans-Pecos east through the Hill Country, wherever rock breaks the surface.

They grow tolerant of people around parks and overlooks, which makes the portrait easy; catching the sentinel pose against a canyon backdrop is the picture worth waiting for.