Species: Sciurus niger

Foraging commonly occurs on the ground. Typical foods include nuts, fungi, seeds, berries, and shoots; other food include tree buds and flowers and small amounts of insects and other animal material. In the southeastern U.S., feeds mostly on pine seeds when they are available. Scatterhoarder; food is cached in the ground in fall. Much of the literature on food habits in the Sandhills of North Carolina, was summarized by Weigl et al. (1989), as follows: <br><br>Food is generally abundant during the spring, and squirrels feed on pine buds, staminate cones, flowers, corms, bulbs, previous seasons' mast, fungi, and insects. The early summer months, however, are the period of the poorest food availability. Increasing temperature and aridity result in less succulent vegetation and fewer emerging insects. Mast from the previous fall has been exhausted, new seeds are not yet available, and fungi and soft mast resources are patchy. Late summer is again a period of food abundance and squirrel activity increases markedly. Green longleaf pine cones become a primary food source and, during years of abundant cone production, squirrels can rapidly gain weight within a relatively restricted foraging area. In more typical years, squirrels forage widely, cutting and eating cones, as well as foraging for dispersed seeds. During this season, soft mast (berries of ILEX, PERSEA, VITIS, and SMILAX), fruits, and fungi are more predictably available and readily eaten. Longleaf pine cones are a crucial food source in that they are practically the only food available until the fall mast crop. The highly nutritious seeds are critical to recovery from the early summer period of food scarcity and in preparation for winter. Because of the fox squirrel's large size, it is almost uniquely adapted to take advantage of this seasonal resource. <br><br>Moore (1957) conducted a two-year study of Sherman's fox squirrel (S. N. SHERMANI) occupying similar longleaf pine-turkey oak forests. Florida squirrels apparently do not undergo the kind of severe early summer food scarcity experienced by those in North Carolina. Weigl et al. (1989) suggested that this may account for the larger size and the higher incidence of summer litters in the Florida subspecies. Mast forms the bulk of the diet during the fall, winter, and parts of the following spring in good mast years. This is particularly true in years of poor pine cone availability. Acorns (QUERCUS LAEVIS, in particular) and hickory nuts (CARYA) may be supplemented by fungi and the seeds and drupes of other hardwoods (LIQUIDAMBAR, NYSSA, and LIRIODENDRON, among others). Pine-oak habitats typically support relatively few oak species with different fruiting phenologies (the so-called red oaks produce acorns the second fall after flowering, while the white oaks mast the first fall after flowering). Because of this low diversity and difference in phenology, a single severe spring frost can destroy the larger part of the mast crop over a two-year period. This can be disastrous for fox squirrels confined to a limited area of suitable habitat. In addition, hickory mast tends to be restricted to moister forest areas and in isolated groves where fox squirrels must compete with gray squirrels and other mast feeders. During the winter, food supplies are dependent upon the fall mast crop and can be variable from year to year. In poor mast years, fox squirrels appear to spend considerable time searching for fallen longleaf pine cones, scattered seeds, and the smaller cones of pond pine (PINUS SEROTINA), and digging for hypogeous fungi around the bases of longleaf pines. During years of poor turkey oak mast availability, fox squirrels in Florida tended to increase time spent foraging in lower-elevation live oak stands which tended to produce more predictable mast (Kantola and Humphrey 1990).