Long-tailed pocket mouse records in Utah come mostly from the state’s western deserts: Washington County, at the Mojave edge, holds 86, and Juab and Millard counties, where Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge sits among salt flats, basin-and-range mountains, and rocky shrub slopes, add 72 more. 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 201 recorded sightings peak in October, with 72, after a smaller spring rise to 25 in May and 31 in June. Nearly all of those records, 199 of 201, 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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