The long-tailed vole is an occasionally recorded resident of Colorado’s high country. Open occurrence databases hold 1,377 Colorado records, almost all from museum and survey specimens rather than photographs, which fits an animal that spends nearly its whole life screened by vegetation.
Where it turns up in Colorado
This is a vole of cool, damp, broken ground, and in Colorado that means the mountains. Records concentrate in the high western and central counties, heaviest around Gunnison, with strong showings in Montezuma, Larimer, and Saguache. The animal keeps to sedge-lined stream edges, willow thickets, subalpine meadows, and moist pockets tucked inside otherwise dry slopes. That habit makes it patchy even where it is well established: a damp meadow below the conifers may hold voles while the dry ridge just above it holds none. The tail, long for a vole and visible beyond the rounded body, is the field mark that separates it from the shorter-tailed meadow and montane voles sharing the same country.
A hidden life, active all winter
The summer weighting of the record is misleading. Long-tailed voles do not hibernate and do not leave; they stay active year-round, running protected lanes beneath snow, grass thatch, and fallen wood. The records simply pile up in the warm months, when snow-free ground and field crews can reach the high meadows where the animal lives. It is a small herbivore living a fast, short life, clipping grasses and forbs close to cover and feeding owls, weasels, and snakes in turn. Most Coloradans will never get a good look at one, yet it quietly converts mountain-meadow plants into prey across the state’s western food webs.
Full species profile
