The hispid pocket mouse carries its meals home in built-in luggage: external, fur-lined cheek pouches it stuffs with grass and forb seeds before hauling them into a sealed burrow. New Mexico sits at the drier western edge of the species’ Great Plains range, and it shows in the numbers: just 49 records since 2000, nearly all GBIF specimen and survey data, with only a single New Mexico sighting on iNaturalist.
Colfax County in the northeast holds 32 of those records and Hidalgo County in the far southwest another 12, with single records from Otero, Grant, Harding, and Los Alamos counties. Reports rise sharply from July through September, tracking summer fieldwork more than any change in this nocturnal seed-hoarder’s underground routine.
NatureServe ranks the species S3, Vulnerable, in New Mexico, a more cautious standing than its secure global status would suggest for a rodent this thin on the ground here.
Full species profile
