Hunting squirrels is a tradition that dates back to early Kentucky.
During the settlement era, as other wild game became scarce, subsistence hunters turned their attention to squirrels to feed their families, taking them with small-caliber flintlock longrifles and smooth bore fowlers, loaded with shot.
In Kentucky’s vast forests, squirrels are abundant, and active throughout most of the year.
According to the 2012 Kentucky Forest Inventory and Analysis Fact Sheet, 48 percent of Kentucky is forested, some 12.4 million acres. An estimated 70 percent of Kentucky forests are composed of saw timber — harvestable, mature trees.
Across Kentucky, 75 percent of all forests, 9.5 million acres, are composed of the oak-hickory forest type, where squirrels thrive. Today, Kentucky’s squirrel season is one of the longest on the annual hunting calendar, opening in late summer and continuing into late winter.
In the 1990s a second squirrel season debuted, when biologists found that they can be hunted in the spring without endangering populations, because squirrels have two breeding seasons.
Kentucky’s spring season is timed to coincide with the spike in squirrel numbers after the year’s first nesting period, and before breeding resumes in July. The spring season started as an experiment on four state wildlife management areas in 1994, then went statewide in 1999, and was extended by two weeks in 2011.
This year the spring squirrel season is 28 days long. It opens on Saturday, May 20, and continues through June 16, 2017.
The daily limit is six squirrels. Shooting hours are one half hour before sunrise to one half hour after sunset.
Hunters will have to search a little to find squirrels since they will not be in the same places they are in the fall. In the spring, squirrels eat mostly soft mast, such as the seeds of maple, ash, elm, wild cherry, mulberry, hackberry and box elder trees.
Creek bottoms are a good place to start a search for squirrels, also thickets of large cedar trees where squirrels often nest.
In the spring, squirrels eat grass, mushrooms, blackberries and insects, such as grasshoppers, katydids and locusts.
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With trees leafed out, squirrels have lots of cover, so a .410 or a 20-gauge shotgun is a good choice for spring squirrel hunting, but rimfire rifles (.22 caliber), air guns (.177, .20 and .22 caliber), and small caliber muzzleloading rifles (.32 and .40 caliber), are also effective.
For the details of hunting regulations, and all legal weapons, for spring squirrel season, consult the 2017 Kentucky Spring Hunting Guide.
Good squirrel hunting is available in all 120 Kentucky counties, and hunting pressure is light during the spring season. The gray squirrel is the dominant species in the heavily-forested eastern third of Kentucky, with a higher percentage of fox squirrels in the small woodlots and wooded fencerows of agricultural areas in Central and Western Kentucky.
Squirrels are the most stable and abundant small game species in Kentucky. Local populations go up and down from year-to-year, based on food availability.
The spring woodlands are beautiful and squirrels are plentiful. It’s a good time to discover what our ancestors experienced when they hunted one of their favorite game animals.
Art Lander Jr. is outdoors editor for NKyTribune and KyForward. He is a native Kentuckian, a graduate of Western Kentucky University and a life-long hunter, angler, gardener and nature enthusiast. He has worked as a newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and author and is a former staff writer for Kentucky Afield Magazine, editor of the annual Kentucky Hunting & Trapping Guide and Kentucky Spring Hunting Guide, and co-writer of the Kentucky Afield Outdoors newspaper column.