I would like the particles to appear evenly across the squirrel’s back but they gather in small patches, when you comb it the squirrel looks like he has attempted to do a comb over. I’m missing some setting…
Yes you are missing a lot :D, all i can do now is to guess what you are doing, 
the best practice is to add screenshot of hair settings or share the blend file. With this image i can see that your children are set to simple, try to change them to interpolated. Again it is just a guess.