Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Eastern Fox Squirrel

The eastern fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) is found from the east coast through the midwest into Colorado. Last summer while visiting Colorado, Judy and I found this squirrel right on a telephone pole across the street from the Buckhorn Exchange,
an old restaurant near downtown Denver. It has a bushy tail with a pale yellow to orange belly.
My Peterson Field Guide to Mammals, published in 1980, does not show the distribution as far west as Denver, but I found a scientific article about the westward spread of the fox squirrel into Colorado and a picture on the internet of a fox squirrel in Boulder, and so I'm confident that it is identified correctly.

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