Ask MDC

Q: What is this animal that has taken up temporary residence in my birdhouse?

This is a southern flying squirrel. Flying squirrels live in holes in trees — usually leftover woodpecker holes. However, they can squeeze into a hole about the size of a quarter, so they could even live in your wren house or attic. 

They are common in Missouri, but they prefer mature oak-hickory forests with plenty of old, dead trees and rotten snags, riddled with woodpecker holes and other cavities. Their dens are usually lined with shredded bark, but other soft material, such as lichens, moss, feathers, or leaves, may be added. Hickory nuts and oak acorns are staple food sources, but seeds of many kinds are eaten and corn is a favorite. They also eat quite a bit more animal foods — mice, shrews, carrion, birds’ eggs, and insects — than other tree squirrels and most rodents.

They are also the strictest of our nocturnal mammals. And they tend to be shy and suspicious, darting into a cavity if alerted by the smallest movement or noise.

On either side of their body, these squirrels have a loose fold of skin, called the patagium, which they use like wings to glide through the air. Cartilaginous spurs off their wrists hold these “wings” taut. Before leaping into space, they assess the landing site and gauge the distance by swaying their bodies and heads from side to side. 

Q: Could you identify this thrush? The photo was taken in Cape Girardeau County in late April 2025.

This is a gray-cheeked thrush. Gray-cheeked thrushes, Swainson’s thrushes, and veery thrushes look similar and migrate through Missouri at the end of April through May, and then again in early fall, and can sometimes be seen together.

Shy and tricky to identify, gray-cheeked thrushes have grayer backs and tails than the reddish-brown veery. Gray-cheeked thrushes lack the warm buffy tan that would be seen around the eye, on the cheek, and on the throat of a Swainson’s thrush.

These birds are notoriously furtive.

“ … its shyness and seclusiveness, its habit of breeding in only the most inaccessible places, and its almost unbroken silence during most of the year have kept the taxonomic, distributional, and life-history facts concerning it in mystery so long that (the gray-cheeked thrush) has been correctly regarded as one of the least known of American passerine birds,” wrote American Ornithologist G.J. Wallace in 1939.

This bird breeds in the taiga — the swampy coniferous forests of the high northern latitudes between the arctic tundra and vast prairies further south. These thrushes prefer tangled thickets where birders are most likely to encounter them during migration.