Northern pocket gophers spend nearly their entire lives underground, using fur-lined external cheek pouches to haul roots and tubers back to a burrow system rather than eating on the surface, and the loose, workable soil around the San Francisco Peaks and the forested plateau country of Coconino and Kaibab national forests gives them exactly the digging conditions they need.
Arizona sits at the southern edge of this species’ range, which runs much farther north across the Rockies and Great Basin, and the state’s rare-bucket record, in the bottom 5 percent of Arizona mammals by occurrence count, likely reflects that marginal position as much as how rarely anyone spots a mound-building burrower that almost never surfaces.
Full species profile
