Gray Squirrel

The eastern gray squirrel is the small-game animal most American hunters actually start on, even more so than cottontail in much of the East. A pound-and-a-half rodent of the hardwood forest, gray with a white belly and a tail that's the whole animal's signature, the gray squirrel lives where there are oaks, hickories, and beeches dropping mast. Hunting them is a stalking exercise — slow walking the ridge in pre-dawn dark, sitting on a log under a hickory and waiting for the cuttings to start raining down, glassing the high crowns for the flick of a tail against a leaf. Squirrel hunting is where eastern hunters learn woodsmanship: how to walk quietly, how to use a tree as a rest, how to read mast crops, how to sit still. A good fall mast year produces squirrels by the thousands per square mile of mature oak-hickory. They're taken with .22 rimfire for the head-shot crowd that wants to preserve every ounce of meat, or with light shotguns for hunters working through leafy cover. Tougher and stronger-flavored than cottontail; squirrel and dumplings is its own southern food tradition.