Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Small Game Does one type of squirrel taste better than another?

My favorite is young squirrel gray or fox versions. Having said that, you can fry the older ones just like young, but then wrap the up in foil and put in crockpot for a 2 hours. They'll tender up and still have the fried flavor. You can also bake them after frying with a bit of moisture to keep them from drying out. Again either is not "quite" as good as just tender fried ones but you'll still like the outcome.

I'm pretty good at telling if they are tender enough to just fry from how the bones in the legs break over a knife blade when skinning. I miss once in a while and fry one that comes out a bit tough but you get pretty good at it over time.

I will add.

If you use a scoped 22 just look for the nuts on a big boar. I pass on quite a few squirrels because they have a set of big nuts. No need to kill those big boars and then have meat tougher than boot leather.

Back in the early 1980's we used to hunt a very productive tract of NY State land, and it was chock full of Grays and Reds. My group tried many ways to prepare the Reds, but never found a way to make it palatable. Reds are fine to avoid starvation, but that's about it.

Find someone who can cook and you will change your mind.

Is a "Red squirrel" the same as a Fox Squirrel?

A young coon taste like squirrel to me if cooked the same way (fried). We only have fox squirrels here, young ones are very good, old ones not so much and need to be smothered to help with toughness.

That's how we look at em around here.

In my neck of the woods a Red squirrel is a smaller squirrel than a grey squirrel but a little bigger than a chipmonk, they are also know locally a Mtn Boomers and nobody i know of has tried to eat one.....Hb

"Red squirrel" = pine squirrel around here.

That is kinda what I thought. Different locations have different names for critters. Here in the Ozarks, there are greys and fox squirrels. If a feller said he killed some red squirrels all of us hillbillies would assume you are talking about fox squirrels. If you said you saw a mountain boomer that would be a collared lizard. Around here collared lizards are known as "mountain boomers" or "glade bitches."

I'm in Southern WV and we call Red squirrels Fairy Diddles. I've eaten them. They taste just like any other squirrel to me.