The Mogollon vole is an occasional and easily overlooked resident of southern Colorado. Open occurrence databases hold 85 records for it here, and effectively all of them trace to museum specimens and small-mammal trapping rather than photographs; this is a vole almost no one sees. Colorado sits at the northern edge of a range centered on the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico.
A grassland vole in the southern mountains
Unlike the wetland-loving voles of the north, the Mogollon vole favors dry grassy openings, ponderosa parkland, and pinyon-juniper slopes with good herbaceous cover. In Colorado its records fall in the southern tier, concentrated in Montezuma, Las Animas, and La Plata counties, in the grassy pockets of the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo foothills where its Southwest range just reaches across the state line.
A narrow, warm-season record
The scattered records cluster in summer, when field surveys run and voles are breeding and most active in the grass. Voles do not hibernate; they stay busy under snow in winter runways. But almost nobody is out live-trapping them then, so the calendar of records reflects when biologists work more than the animal’s own year.
Status in Colorado
The Mogollon vole is native to Colorado but ranked S3, vulnerable, by NatureServe, a more cautious rank than most Colorado rodents carry and a reflection of how few, small, and edge-of-range its populations here are. Globally it remains least concern.
Full species profile
