7 April 2026

Is Siberian Flying Squirrel real?

… is the top suggestion by Google for additional questions to ask when looking for info about the species. At first I didn’t understand where that came from. Now I do.

From the five nights in early April 2026 we had, we looked primarily for the squirrels during three – in Nuuksio, around Mäntyharju and near Lahti, always at sites with plentiful recent observations on iNaturalist or laji.fi. The vast majority of these observations are of squirrel droppings, which are easy to miss due to them being tiny, but unmistakable when found. They are apparently much easier to find when there is snow, but during our visit, all snow was gone and we only found them once, in the Urajärvi cultural park. We used both thermal and red spotlight, walking the sites from late afternoons until 1-3 a.m. and found absolutely no hint of an animal. The “look through” design of our Pulsar is not great for scanning tall trees all the way to zenith and a device with an external display would have probably been less daunting to use for this purpose.

For two nights, we went east to the area between Lieksa and Patvinsuo NP where Wolverines are observed (while flying squirrels mostly aren’t). Most observations seem to be from comemrcial hides, but in a Google review of a lodge for example someone notes a Wolverine crossing the road before arrival. We tried our luck in the area with a combination of walking and driving, again mostly in late afternoons and deep into the nights. There are many dirt tracks around that could be driven, but some were still blocked by leftover snow or too mushy from all the runoff, so we mostly stayed on the main tracks and roads – there was absolutely no traffic at night anyway. We also hiked about 3.5 kms out at night to camp in a NP campsite with a lookout tower covering a large area of the bogs.

The nature there is surprisingly different from the areas around Helsinki or Saimaa – spruce is relatively rare and most woodlands are pine and birch; the vibe is definitely siberian. We found fresh bear, moose and presumably wolf tracks, beaver signs and all sorts of intruiging scat – the area was clearly quite lively! But even after many hours, the only animals we actually saw were Mountain Hare and Bank Vole (surprisingly to us climbing in trees); we also heard a beaver tail-slap and Ivana saw a “long flat animal walking from one branch to another” in thermal, which might have been a weasel maybe? Who knows. Together with the introduced White-tailed Deer in Nuuksio and a Red Fox in Urajärvi, we can confidently claim the whooping total of four mammal species observed in six days.

While the wolverine expedition was a long shot (but was well worth it because of the beauty of the area), for the flying squirrels I was pretty optimistic that we could find something, given that we could follow all the recent observations with precise locations and we even found some droppings on site – I am still a little lost as to what should we have done differently. Finland is beautiful, with literally endless nature that is freely accessible due to the “Everyman’s right” (freedom to roam) and it’s a pleasure to just be there, but seeing any mammals is surprisingly difficult.

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JanEbr
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