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. The state’s record since 2000 comes down to a single iNaturalist observation from Coconino County in August 2018, which puts it in the bottom 5 percent of Arizona mammals by occurrence count and likely reflects that marginal position as much as how rarely anyone spots a mound-building burrower that almost never surfaces.
Full species profile
