I was so excited to open iNat tonight and see that an older observation I posted of some bones received an ID. The story is that in December of 2024, I found an owl pellet in my backyard (we have a barred owl hanging around each winter so maybe it was from that owl, but I don’t know). I posted about the pellet here in the forum to ask about the best way to extract the bones.
I finally got around to extracting the bones about 6 months later (July of 2025). Not knowing at all what I was doing, I washed and dried them, took some measurements, posted, and hoped for the best. Pretty quickly it was ID’d as a squirrel and that’s as far as it got (so I figured either a Douglas’s tree or ground squirrel (the only squirrels I am familiar with in this area). Tonight it was ID’d as a Humboldt’s Flying Squirrel (Glaucomys oregonensis)!
I had no idea we even had those squirrels here!! This was very exciting for me (and for my husband, too)!
Here are the observations if you want to see them…
I don’t know a lot about them, but I think they have skin between their arms and body that allow them to glide long distances between trees. I’m going to have to do some research now.
They would more accurately be called gliding squirrels, but flying sounds cooler. Same thing with flying fish, flying frogs, flying lizards, and flying snakes.
They can get a bit of lift when they’re in a power glide and then they pull up at the end.
Really neat animals that I grew up with in Southern Ontario. Often around, but rarely seen.
I don’t know where you live, and Barred Owl would be extremely likely to have coughed up that pellet. But one of the interesting things about our cryptic Humboldt’s Flying Squirrels is that they make up the majority of the diet of the Northern Spotted Owl! Unless you found it in one of the very few remote protected old growth where the Spotted Owls are in the PNW, that is extremely unlikely to be the predator (and Barred Owls are particularly a concern because they outcompete the Spotted Owl with their adaptability) but a healthy flying squirrel population is an important part of our ecosystems in those forests.
Humboldt’s Flying Squirrels are also extremely interesting because they were only described in 2017, and only identified as a separate species through genetic analysis.
Plus they fluoresce pink in UV light.
My sibling had one come up and hang out within a foot of them while camping in the Coast Range one night. I’m forever jealous.
I think it’s important to mention what a lot of people have left out – since they’re nocturnal, they have very big dark eyes that make them cuter than your average squirrel.
I live on the south-central Oregon Coast (Florence, OR), but it was found in my yard, so not in old growth forest. There are some old growth near here, but not really sure anything close enough (not sure what the range would be for the Northern Spotted Owl). 9 days prior to posting the pellet, I posted a photo of the barred owl taken in my yard. Still, hard to say for sure if that owl was the one that left the pellet. I also don’t know if the owl would catch something elsewhere, but the pellet would come up here (or how long it takes for a pellet to be expelled after eating something)?
Very interesting. Thank you for sharing this. I will tell you that my husband and I both thought the Humboldt Flying Squirrel was super cute when we looked up the photo!