South Carolina has a single golden mouse record since 2000, an iNaturalist observation from Anderson County in the Piedmont, logged in April 2018. One record can’t show where the mouse lives in the state; it marks only where someone happened to find one.
Golden mice live in vine tangles and greenbrier thickets, cover where they’re easy to miss. Occurrence records show where people looked, not where the mouse lives, and with the only recent record dating to 2018, the recent picture is nearly blank even though nothing suggests the species has gone anywhere.
NatureServe ranks the golden mouse secure in South Carolina, a notably firmer standing than it holds in neighboring states. The mix of a nearly empty recent record and a secure rank makes this a species worth reporting whenever a nest turns up in a winter tangle.
Full species profile
