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Animals · Woods and fields of North America

Eastern gray squirrel

Sciurus carolinensis

It buries thousands of nuts alone

A gray squirrel burying a nut, one of several thousand it will hide alone across a single autumn.
A gray squirrel burying a nut, one of several thousand it will hide alone across a single autumn.
  • Status: Safe
  • Woods, parks and backyards of eastern North America, and introduced to Europe

Numbers

Weight
18 ozfrom 14 to 21 oz as an adult
Length
11 inhead and body, from 9 to 12 in; the tail adds 8 to 10 in
Lifespan
6 yearstypical for an adult; up to 12 in exceptional cases and 20 in captivity
Weight at birth
0,5 ozfrom 0.5 to 0.6 oz
One bound
3 ftfrom 2 to 3 ft
Woodland used
100 acresfor a mature population

Ten fun facts

  1. a gray squirrel buries its nuts one by one across its whole territory instead of making a single store.

  2. the nuts it forgets become trees, so the squirrel plants more of the wood than it manages to eat.

  3. when another squirrel is watching it will mime burying a nut, then hide the real one elsewhere.

  4. its front teeth grow all its life, so it gnaws on bark it has no intention of eating.

  5. one bound carries it up to three feet, which is roughly three times its own body length.

  6. a newborn gray squirrel weighs about half an ounce, which is less than a single slice of bread.

  7. in Europe it is on the official list of invasive species that member states must control.

  8. it carries a virus that it survives and the European red squirrel usually does not.

  9. it was introduced to Australia as well, and there the whole population had died out by 1973.

  10. a healthy population needs about a hundred acres of dense mature woodland to feed and nest in.

The quiz answers

Five questions about this animal. Pick an answer and find out if it is the right one.

Question 1 of 5

How does a gray squirrel store its food?

Question 2 of 5

What does a squirrel do when a rival is watching it bury food?

Question 3 of 5

Why does a squirrel gnaw on bark it cannot eat?

Question 4 of 5

What happens to the nuts a squirrel forgets?

Question 5 of 5

Why is the gray squirrel a problem in Europe?

Try it yourself

Experiment 1

Hide ten coins around a room, one at a time, without writing anything down. Come back in a week and find them all, as a squirrel does.

Experiment 2

Measure three feet on the floor: that is one squirrel bound. Now try to cover it in a single jump from standing.

Experiment 3

Weigh out half an ounce of rice on a kitchen scale. That is what a gray squirrel weighs on the day it is born.

Data from Wikidata (Q468500) and Wikipedia (Eastern gray squirrel).