Long-tailed pocket mouse records in Utah center on Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge and the wider Great Salt Lake desert, a landscape of salt flats, basin-and-range mountains, and rocky shrub slopes. The salt crust itself isn’t habitat; this mouse needs the shrubby ground bordering it, in the Bonneville basin and similar dry terrain further west.
Utah’s 804 recorded sightings peak from May through July, with 127 in May alone, then a second, smaller rise to 113 in October after the summer heat eases. Nearly all of those records, 801 of 804, come from GBIF rather than iNaturalist, pointing to systematic trapping surveys behind the count rather than casual photo sightings of a small, mostly nocturnal rodent.
NatureServe lists it as S3, Vulnerable, in Utah, despite a records count that outnumbers many more secure Utah species, a reminder that occurrence totals track survey effort more than population health.
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