Mearns's squirrel

Mearns's squirrel, Tamiasciurus douglasii mearnsi, is a tree squirrel from the mountains of Baja California in Mexico. It was once ranked as a species of its own because its forest island is cut off from the range of its relatives, but genetic work found little difference from the Douglas squirrel, so it is now treated as a subspecies of that animal. It is small, about 20 cm from head to body and roughly 270 g, with grey-brown fur above, a pale yellow-patched belly, a black stripe on each flank and a bushy tail fringed in white and yellow. It is known from only three pine and fir forest sites at 2,100 to 2,400 m in the Sierra de San Pedro Martir, covering no more than about 40,655 ha. Active by day, it eats mostly fir and pine seeds, does not hoard food, and rests in tree cavities. It is listed as endangered, and habitat loss and possibly competition from introduced eastern gray squirrels threaten it.