Botta’s pocket gopher is famous for how much it varies from valley to valley. Isolated populations across the West once earned researchers more than 200 subspecies names, and Texas’s own piece of that range sits in the separated desert mountains of the Trans-Pecos, Big Bend, the Guadalupe Mountains, and the Davis Mountains, each holding its own pocket of diggable soil.
Every one of the state’s 316 records comes from GBIF specimen data, with no iNaturalist observations at all, unsurprising for a burrower that spends nearly its whole life below ground and is known mainly by its crescent-shaped surface mounds rather than by sight. Monthly counts are scattered and thin, with high points in March and August rather than one clear season, more a reflection of when trapping surveys ran than of the gopher’s own schedule. NatureServe lists the Texas population S5, Secure.
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