The Idaho pocket gopher spends nearly its whole life underground, and Wyoming holds only a sliver of its world. The species is centered in southern Idaho and northern Utah, and Wyoming marks the northeastern edge of its range. That edge shows plainly in the data: 50 of the state’s 51 records come from Uinta and Lincoln counties, the two southwestern counties pressed against the Idaho and Utah lines. A single Sublette County record is the lone outlier.
NatureServe ranks the pocket gopher critically imperiled in Wyoming, but that rank has to be read with the range-edge context. A species can be peripheral and genuinely thin on the ground at the same time, and with records from only three counties, the survey effort needed to separate the two hasn’t happened yet. Pocket gophers are also easy to overlook: fresh dirt mounds are usually the only sign, and telling this species’ sign apart from the northern pocket gopher’s takes a practiced eye.
Reports run from May through August, with July and August the heaviest, matching the months when digging sign is freshest and field crews are working the sagebrush basins of the southwest corner.
Full species profile
