The other day I was making a phone call in the corner of our compound (where the best reception is and I can look out over the forest and see Congo in the distance!). All of a sudden I saw an animal I had never seen before jumping from one branch to another. The thought struck me immediately: the African Giant Squirrel! I had only seen these in pictures : a 30+cm body, beautifully red brown on the back, and a large grey head, with a broad and flamboyant white and black banded tail of another 30cm.

I checked Jonathan Kingdon’s East African Mammals book to find out what its supposed distribution is: “the Giant Squirrel is limited to well-developed high forests in tropical areas of West and Central Africa”. The distribution map shows that its occurence stops east of the Albertine Rift and Kingdon says that this squirrel occurs in mountain forests of eastern Congo, up to 2100 meter and “probably ranges that high also in parts of East Africa”. We are at an altitude of 2345 meter… could this be another little sign of warmer temperatures than usual (climate change) or was the squirrel running out of food at lower elevation?

People were at first sceptical when I mentioned my sighting, but in the meantime Douglas and I have seen one together, twice now and are convinced this really is the African Giant Squirrel! Hard to take a picture of… but I promise to put it on the blog if I manage!