I am thinking this is a female since it was quite small, not much bigger than some of the well-fed Gray Squirrels that hang around my house. This may be the same animal I saw twenty minutes later on a different part of the trail, less than a quarter of a mile away. In a conifer on the Heart Lake Trail: https://wildadirondacks.org/heart-lake-trail.html
Very unexpected. Flying low back and forth along the trail, and sometimes sitting on low vegetation.
Several plants