Banner-tailed kangaroo rats build some of the largest rodent mounds in North America, packed-earth “houses” that can hold a maze of tunnels and food caches and stay in use for generations. Their black-and-white banner tail, waved like a flag when they bound across open ground, gives the species its name.
Texas’s 109 records cluster around Big Bend, Guadalupe Mountains, and the Davis Mountains, the desert grassland and scrub this species needs for its mounds. The monthly pattern shows a real late-spring push, with May and June each near 20 records, roughly triple the winter low, likely tied to breeding-season activity rather than survey effort alone given the size of the sample.
The IUCN lists the species Near Threatened globally, but NatureServe’s Texas rank, S4 Apparently Secure, reads more comfortably, suggesting the state’s population is holding up better than the species is doing across its full range.
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