Cotton mice reach the western edge of their range in the piney woods and bottomland hardwoods of East Texas, Big Thicket National Preserve, Davy Crockett National Forest, and Sabine National Forest, all sitting in the wetter, forested quarter of the state this species needs. Among tracked Texas mammals it lands in the rare bucket (16.7th percentile), one of the more sparsely documented species in the state, and nearly all 776 records come through GBIF rather than iNaturalist.
Records cluster hard in January and March, with a steep drop-off by late summer and fall; given how GBIF-dominated the record set is, that pattern more likely reflects when specimen surveys were run than any real winter activity peak for a nocturnal, secretive mouse. NatureServe ranks the species secure (S5) in Texas despite the sparse record count.
Full species profile
