Nebraska’s olive-backed pocket mouse record splits between two landscapes. Half the mapped reports come from the Panhandle counties of Dawes, Sioux, and Cheyenne, and most of the rest from Cherry County in the Sandhills, with the Nebraska National Forest among the named sites. Both are sandy-soil country, and a mouse that needs loose ground for burrows and seed caches has good reason for the split.
The whole file is fourteen reports, running from July into fall. That’s too small a sample to carry much interpretation, so treat the seasonal shape as suggestive rather than proven. A few nights of trapping in the right Sandhills pasture could redraw it quickly.
What gives the record its weight is the rank. NatureServe lists the mouse as S1, critically imperiled in Nebraska, even though the species is secure across its full range. Nebraska sits near the southeastern edge of that range, and edge populations are where a species thins first. Each confirmed Panhandle or Sandhills report helps mark where the mouse still hangs on.
Full species profile
