The Carolina northern flying squirrel is a cold-weather animal descendent from the northern flying squirrels pushed south by the ice sheets that covered northern latitudes during the last ice age. When the ice sheets receded, some of these squirrels found refuge on the tops of our highest mountains. Over the millennia, these squirrels differentiated from their northern cousins and today are a subspecies found only in the Southern Appalachians where northern hardwood forests give way to spruce-fir forests.