Washington’s 368 bushy-tailed woodrat records span both sides of the Cascades, a rare pattern in this atlas. Yakima and Grant counties anchor the dry side, where the species dens in rimrock and cliff country, while Clallam, Pierce, and Pend Oreille hold it in wetter forest and talus, from Olympic National Park and the Buckhorn Wilderness to the Daniel J. Evans Wilderness Area.
The original packrat
Woodrats are famous collectors, dragging sticks, bones, and anything shiny back to a stick house that shelters generation after generation in the same rocky crevice. The bushy-tailed woodrat is the big, squirrel-tailed species of the West’s rocky slopes, and its nocturnal habits explain why most Washington records are signs, scat, or camera images rather than live sightings. It eats leaves, needles, fungi, and berries, and it climbs well enough to forage above the ground it nests under.
Most visible in high summer
Washington counts build through June and July and crest in August, when long nights of foraging and dispersing young put the animals in front of cameras and headlights. The species does not hibernate. Winter records thin because a woodrat can sit out cold spells inside its stick house, living off cached food, not because the animals leave.
Status in Washington
NatureServe ranks the bushy-tailed woodrat S5, Secure, in Washington, and the species is native across the state. USGS NAS does not list it as nonindigenous here.
Full species profile
