Carolina Northern Flying Squirrel

Two flying squirrels

Two flying squirrels live in these mountains. The southern flying squirrel is the common one, down low in hardwood and mixed pine forest. The Carolina northern flying squirrel is bigger, ten to twelve inches long counting the tail, and lives near the tops of the highest ranges. North Carolina’s wildlife commission says the two overlap at around 4,000 to 5,000 feet. The northern’s back is gray washed with brown, tan or red, and its belly is grayish or buffy white. Part the belly fur and the hairs are gray at the base, where a southern’s are white. Both glide on a furred flap of skin stretched between wrist and ankle and steer with a broad, flat tail about four-fifths of the animal’s total length, by the Service’s figure.

You’re unlikely to see one. They come out at dusk, spend much of their waking time on the ground, and den in cracks and cavities in trees, in nests lined with shredded birch bark, or in leafy nests built in the conifer branches. The Service gives a litter of two to five, once a year. The wildlife commission says two to four, once or twice a year.

Truffle hunters

Most of what they eat grows underground. Truffles, the fruiting bodies of fungi that live on tree roots, are the staple, with lichens, seeds, fruit, buds and insects on the side. Red spruce and Fraser fir host plenty of truffle fungi, which is why the Fish and Wildlife Service calls those forests critical foraging ground. The squirrel spreads fungal spores as it goes, and the wildlife commission credits it with helping keep the forest that feeds it.

Left on the summits

The Service traces the subspecies to the last ice age, when cold-country animals were pushed far south. As the climate warmed, some populations moved north and others stayed on the coldest southern peaks, isolated long enough to become something of their own. Biologists first found it in North Carolina in the early 1950s on Mount Mitchell, Roan Mountain and in the Smokies. After it was listed as endangered in 1985, surveys turned it up in eight ranges: the Long Hope, Roan, Grandfather and Black and Craggy mountains north and east of the French Broad, and the Great Balsam, Plott Balsam, Smoky and Unicoi mountains south and west of it.

Logging around 1900, and the fires after it, broke up those high forests, and the commission says the Great Balsams and the Blacks are still recovering. The balsam woolly adelgid has killed most of North Carolina’s mature Fraser fir, beech bark disease is killing the high-country beeches, and the Service adds acid deposition and a warming climate. Biologists are planting red spruce in places to bring the conifers back.