Nevada’s occurrence records for the northern grasshopper mouse are thin, 307 in total, and sit at the far western edge of a range centered hundreds of miles east on the Great Plains.
A Mojave Desert outpost
Colorado alone accounts for more than five times Nevada’s total, and most of the species’ range runs through shortgrass prairie and high plains far from the Mojave. Here, the mouse instead works the creosote flats and rocky washes around Desert National Wildlife Refuge, Red Rock Canyon, and Lake Mead, desert scrub that offers the same open, bare-ground hunting terrain the species uses everywhere else, just further west and lower in elevation than its Great Plains stronghold.
A small hunter among scorpions
Grasshopper mice earn their name honestly. They kill and eat grasshoppers, beetles, scorpions, and even other rodents, closing in with quick bites rather than gathering seeds. That diet lines up well with the Mojave Desert’s own scorpions, including species whose stings deter most other predators. Research on this mouse has documented unusual resistance to painful scorpion venom, a trait that would serve it well working the same rocky ground around Las Vegas where bark scorpions turn up. At night, an adult may rear back and give a high, carrying call to hold its territory, a small sound for an animal barely bigger than a house mouse.
Status in Nevada
NatureServe ranks the northern grasshopper mouse S5, secure, and it’s native to Nevada. Records here run thin and cluster from May through August, but that reflects a species living at the western tip of its range rather than one in any real trouble.
Full species profile
