The University of Nebraska-Lincoln was one of nine colleges and universities across the country awarded a grant from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom this year.
The grant is a partnership between Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and the National Wildlife Federation, which funds universities working to advance conservation, education and research for threatened species in their communities.
UNL's award will support habitat assessments and nest box installations for Southern Flying Squirrels on East Campus.
Lord Ameyaw, an assistant professor and forester with UNL's School of Natural Resources on East Campus, applied for the grant. This wasn't his first attempt; Ameyaw and his team applied for the same grant last year.
"We almost made it, but we didn't get it," Ameyaw said. "But since we already had everything done, we kind of just updated everything and reapplied this year, and we ended up getting it."
Cameron Lyons, a recent UNL graduate, is working on the project as a non-degree-seeking graduate student. Lyons said Ameyaw recruited him two years ago, while Lyons was taking one of Ameyaw's classes.
Lyons said the team's work so far has focused on mapping nest boxes across campus and assessing the health of each tree a box is attached to, looking at canopy coverage, decay and dead branches.
"We mainly want to improve the habitat for flying squirrels here because they're in a fringe habitat, meaning they're in a very small portion of land in Nebraska," Lyons said. "On East Campus they're so loved and a wonder to everyone, we want to be able to keep them around and make sure the habitat stays well enough for them to live and their population numbers to thrive."
Ameyaw said the project also has a public component. The team hopes to develop a self-guided tour once its habitat map is complete, along with trail camera footage that lets people see the nocturnal squirrels they'd otherwise rarely encounter.
The southern flying squirrel is a small glider with a white belly and flat tail used to steer mid-air. A furry membrane called a patagium connects to each wrist and ankle; this lets the animal glide from tree to tree.
Before 2021, biologists believed the species existed only in Nebraska's southeast corner, near Indian Cave State Park.
That changed in December 2021, when a UNL landscape crew removing dying trees on East Campus found squirrels in a hollow tree.
"He turned his video on, and he got this really nice video of a bunch of flying squirrels coming out of the tree," John Carroll, Emeritus Professor of Wildlife, said. He has helped lead the university’s flying squirrel research since the animals were first discovered on campus
There has long been debate about how the squirrels got to Lincoln in the first place. Flying squirrels, while illegal to own in Nebraska, are often kept as pets.
"People do keep them for pets. You can go on the internet and buy flying squirrels as pets. In a lot of states, people keep them whether it's legal or not," Carroll said.
Some guess that the city’s older neighborhoods became populated with flying squirrels after some were kept as pets but escaped or were released.
Carroll believes there is a much simpler explanation; the squirrels likely spread west on their own, following wooded stream corridors between Nebraska City and Lincoln.
"If you look at photos of Lincoln around the turn of the twentieth century, you just see a bunch of buildings plopped down on the grass," Carroll said. " There are no trees. But over the last hundred years, we've planted lots of nut-bearing trees, oaks and other species, and they've grown up."
Many of Lincoln's oldest neighborhoods have trees nearing 100 years old, with cavities and dying limbs that make an ideal squirrel habitat, the same conditions found on East Campus.
The discovery in 2021 led Carroll, his colleagues and students to start building and distributing flying squirrel nest boxes. The boxes gave squirrels a place to stay besides in people's attics or dying trees.
Carroll learned the box design from a retired Ohio professor, who happened to be a UNL graduate, and had studied flying squirrels for 25 years.
He adapted the designs into what he calls the "Carroll design."
"The research boxes are actually pretty hard to make," Carroll said. "When you get beginner woodworkers trying to do them, it creates a lot of extra issues. The simplified design I came up with makes it easy; we can sit down and make a mass of these boxes for flying squirrels."
Different research boxes include hardware cloth inside, so researchers can reach in and handle squirrels to tag them, something that Carroll’s team hasn’t done on East Campus.
Instead, they focus on monitoring whether the squirrels use the boxes at all, using trail cameras to track their activity.
"We got some great videos of flying squirrels going in and out of the boxes, which is a lot of fun," Carroll said. "They're very hyperactive little guys."
An undergraduate student later turned the project into the Lincoln Flying Squirrel Squad, an urban wildlife education effort funded by the Nebraska Watchable Wildlife Grant through the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission.
Graduate students studied which Lincoln habitats and neighborhoods produced the most public sightings.
Residents can report flying squirrel sightings through UNL's Southern Flying Squirrel Project's website, which offers guidance for building and placing nest boxes.
Carroll recommends mounting boxes on the side of large diameter trees, 10 to 20 feet off the ground, facing south to help the box warm up and block the cold winter winds.
Many sightings have come from homeowners who set up trail cameras on their feeders and later found squirrels showing up in the middle of the night.
For Carroll, this project has never been about the exotic. He spent much of his career studying birds in remote parts of the world but said Lincoln's flying squirrels are a reminder that his own city has wildlife worth paying attention to.
"It's a reminder that even in a pretty big urban area like Lincoln, wildlife is in our backyard," Carroll said. " Not all wildlife biologists go out and work in exotic parts of the world. We have urban wildlife biologists right here in Nebraska who work on these species, and it enhances the quality of our lives."
Carroll said he hopes Ameyaw and future students keep the project going.
"I think it could turn into a long-term monitoring project," Carroll said. "And something that ten years from now, our undergraduates can be learning about as part of their career."