Great Basin pocket mouse barely registers in Arizona: open occurrence databases hold no Arizona records for it from 2000 onward, and its place in the state rests on older records. That thinness is exactly what the species’ range predicts: Arizona sits at the extreme southern edge of a range centered hundreds of miles north, in the sagebrush basins of the Great Basin.
A Great Basin animal that barely crosses into Arizona
Those older records come from Mohave and Coconino counties in the Arizona Strip north of the Grand Canyon, the one corner of the state where the sagebrush and shrub-steppe country the species needs actually reaches south of the Utah line. Everywhere else in Arizona, from the Sonoran Desert basins to the Sky Islands, sits outside its known habitat entirely.
A burrow sealed against the desert surface
Like other pocket mice, this species plugs its burrow entrance from the inside during the day, trapping humidity and buffering against surface temperature swings, then forages after dark for the grass and shrub seed it carries home in fur-lined cheek pouches. Across its range, activity above ground drops off once the animal seals in for the cooler months.
Status in Arizona
Great Basin pocket mouse is treated as native to its mapped Arizona range and isn’t flagged as nonindigenous by USGS NAS, though it hasn’t received a state conservation rank here. A blank recent record at the far edge of a species’ range doesn’t on its own show the animal is gone, only that no one has documented it there since 2000.
Full species profile
