The eastern woodrat reaches its far western limit on the Colorado plains. Open occurrence databases hold 65 records for it in the state, all of them museum and survey specimens rather than photographs, the quiet trail of a large nocturnal packrat that few people ever see.
Rocky draws on the eastern plains
This woodrat is an eastern-forest animal probing the dry western edge of its range, so in Colorado it holds to the rocky bluffs, brushy draws, and wooded creek bottoms of the eastern plains. The records line up with that habitat, led by Yuma County out on the northeastern short-grass tableland and reaching south through Crowley, Pueblo, and El Paso. It needs the shelter of rock outcrops or dense shrubbery in a landscape that is otherwise open and exposed.
A builder of stick houses
The eastern woodrat is the classic pack rat, heaping a bulky lodge of sticks, bones, and whatever oddments it can carry against a boulder or the base of a thicket. Inside, it stores food and raises its young, foraging by night on nuts, seeds, buds, and green stems. A single stick house may be used and enlarged by one tenant after another over many years.
Status in Colorado
NatureServe ranks the eastern woodrat S3, vulnerable, in Colorado, where it occupies only a thin band of suitable habitat at the margin of its distribution. It is far more common in the wooded country farther east.
Full species profile
