New Hampshire has 164 documented hairy-tailed mole records, drawn from iNaturalist and GBIF. That count tracks documentation, not how many moles are actually digging beneath the state’s forests and fields.
A digger that needs the right ground
This mole needs soil it can tunnel through easily, sandy or loamy ground rather than waterlogged peat or thin rock. New Hampshire’s Merrimack Valley river terraces and the lower, forested foothills of the White Mountains offer exactly that kind of workable soil. The wet bogs of the North Country and the thin, rocky ground above treeline on the Presidential Range give this mole far less to dig through, so the scatter of records across the state likely follows real soil limits as much as where people have looked.
A hairy tail and a hidden life
Unlike New Hampshire’s star-nosed mole and the common eastern mole, this species carries a short, furred tail instead of a naked one, a genuine field mark on the rare occasion one turns up in the open. It spends nearly all its life a few inches underground, hunting earthworms and insect larvae through a network of tunnels, so most confirmed reports come from a mole surfacing briefly, dug up by a gardener, or caught by a cat rather than a deliberate sighting. Records climb through spring and peak in early-to-mid summer, which likely tracks when the ground is easiest to work and surface encounters are easiest to catch.
Status in New Hampshire
NatureServe ranks the hairy-tailed mole S5, secure, and it’s native to New Hampshire. It persists as a quiet, rarely seen digger across the state’s better-drained forest and field soils.
