Oklahoma’s occurrence databases hold 30 records of the eastern harvest mouse, all logged through GBIF, with reports near Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge, Red Slough Wildlife Management Area, and Lake Thunderbird State Park. That thin count fits a species that’s genuinely hard to detect, tiny, nocturnal, and rarely out from under cover.
A wet-grass specialist at the western edge of its range
The eastern harvest mouse needs dense, seasonally wet grass and old-field cover thick enough to hide an animal barely longer than a finger, and it’s mostly a southeastern species, its range running from Virginia and Florida west through Tennessee and finally into Oklahoma and Texas at the margin. Red Slough, with its bottomland marsh and wet grassy edges in the far southeastern corner of the state, is about as close as Oklahoma gets to the core habitat this mouse needs elsewhere in its range. Salt Plains, out on the drier salt flats of north-central Oklahoma, offers a much thinner slice of that same grassy-edge habitat around its lake margins.
Why NatureServe calls it imperiled here
NatureServe ranks the eastern harvest mouse S2, imperiled, in Oklahoma, and that fits the pattern nationally: this mouse depends on unmowed, ungrazed grass and marsh edges that vanish quickly under haying, heavy grazing, or drainage. Oklahoma sits at the dry, heavily grazed western edge of a species built for the wetter grasslands of the Gulf and Atlantic coastal plain, so the specific habitat it needs is naturally scarcer here than further east and south, even before any local land-use pressure is added on top.
Status in Oklahoma
NatureServe ranks the eastern harvest mouse S2, imperiled, in Oklahoma, against a global rank of G5. It isn’t listed as nonindigenous by USGS NAS and is native to its Oklahoma range.
Full species profile
