South Carolina’s eastern harvest mouse records hug the coastal plain. Charleston and Orangeburg counties together hold 17 of the state’s 21 records, a tight Lowcountry cluster for a mouse that could, in principle, live in rank grass anywhere in the state. That shape says where trapping and small-mammal work has happened, not where the mouse stops.
The calendar is even more lopsided: 13 records fall in December. Harvest mice don’t migrate or hibernate, so a one-month pileup reads as a survey signature, cool-season fieldwork when the grass is down and traps catch cleanly. Spread a mouse’s real activity across the year and the records will follow the field crews instead.
The habitat elsewhere in the state, Congaree’s floodplain woods, the Sumter forests, the Carolina Sandhills, holds plenty of the grassy, weedy edge this species uses, so the empty counties deserve skepticism rather than confidence. NatureServe ranks the mouse Apparently Secure (S4) in South Carolina, but with a record this thin and this effort-shaped, that grade rests more on available habitat than on anyone having looked in most of the state.
Full species profile
