Northern broad-footed moles spend nearly their whole lives underground, pushing tunnels through loose, workable soil from Sierra Nevada foothills to the oak country of Los Padres National Forest and the Central Valley. Most people never see the animal itself, only the ridges and molehills it leaves behind.
That’s part of why most of California’s records for this species come from museum and survey specimens rather than photographs, a common pattern for fossorial mammals that rarely show themselves above ground. Reports pick up sharply each spring, climbing from a few hundred in January to a peak above 500 in April before easing off through summer, a rhythm more likely tied to wet soil and visible digging than to any real seasonal boom in moles.
Among mammals tracked across the state, this species turns up often enough to count as one of the more frequently documented, though that mostly reflects how easy its burrow signs are to spot along trails and farmland, not a true population count.
Full species profile
