Missouri’s fulvous harvest mouse records hug the state’s southwestern corner. Douglas, McDonald, Newton, and Jasper counties account for almost all of the 17 reports, putting Missouri’s known population at the northern tip of a range that runs south through Texas and into Mexico. George Washington Carver National Monument, with three records, is the most-recorded named place.
Eleven of the 17 records fall in November. Harvest mice don’t do anything special in November, but mammalogists do: late-autumn trapping, after the grass has cured and before winter shuts down fieldwork, is prime season for small-mammal surveys. Read the spike as effort, and read the rest of the calendar as a mouse that’s active in every season but rarely encountered without traps.
Compared to its cousin the eastern harvest mouse, the fulvous favors taller, ranker grass, and in Missouri that means old fields and prairie edges in the Ozark border country. NatureServe ranks it Vulnerable (S3) in the state, a sensible grade for a species at its range limit in fragmented habitat. With so few records, the true map is probably a little wider than the drawn one, and each new southwestern-county record helps prove it.
Full species profile
