Georgia carries 894 records for this mouse, nearly all from GBIF, and 888 of them come from Baker County in the southwest, which says more about where survey work has been done than about the mouse’s full Georgia range. Georgia’s fall-line sandhills, the loose, well-drained sand belt running across the middle of the state, and the dune systems on the barrier islands give it exactly the loose, open sandy ground it needs to burrow.
This is a digging specialist, not a general-purpose field mouse. It excavates a network of burrows in bare or sparsely vegetated sand, and on the barrier islands a related population known as the beach mouse lives in the dune grass right behind the surf, a habitat found nowhere else in the state. Inland, it favors old fields, sandhill scrub, and longleaf pine understory kept open by fire.
Records run from March through November and peak in May, with none from December through February, a gap that likely tracks when trapping surveys run rather than any change in a resident burrower that stays active all year.
