The hairy-tailed mole is a mountain species here, with records clustering in the high country of Pisgah National Forest, Nantahala National Forest, and the coves around Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That’s a different range picture from the common eastern mole, which dominates the state’s Piedmont and Coastal Plain lowlands; this species instead favors the cooler, moister soils found at higher elevations in the Blue Ridge.
Like other moles, it spends nearly its whole life underground, pushing shallow ridges through loose forest soil as it hunts earthworms and grubs. Its short, thick, hairy tail sets it apart from the eastern mole’s nearly bare one, though most records here come from a raised burrow ridge rather than a direct sighting of the animal itself.
Reports cluster in the mountain forests where people have looked, and they thin out fast toward the Piedmont. That pattern says more about where hikers and researchers spend time in western North Carolina than about the mole’s true range limits.
