Japanese squirrel

The Japanese squirrel (Sciurus lis) is a tree squirrel in the genus Sciurus endemic to Japan, described by the Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck in 1844. It was long treated as a subspecies of the Eurasian red squirrel, to which it is closely related, and it is thought to descend from red squirrels that colonized the Japanese archipelago in the Pleistocene. It ranges over Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, is absent from Hokkaido, where a red squirrel subspecies lives instead, and is believed to have been lost from Kyushu. Adults measure 16 to 22 centimetres from head to tail base, with a tail of 13 to 17 centimetres, and weigh 250 to 310 grams. The fur is red-brown, turning grey in winter, with a white ring around the eye and a white belly. It lives in mixed-species and pine forests, is diurnal and solitary, and feeds on seeds, fruits, buds and flowers, hoarding thick-shelled walnuts. Hunting has been illegal in Japan since 1994, and the main threats are habitat loss and forest fragmentation.