South Dakota’s plains harvest mouse record is as thin as it gets: a single report since 2000, from Pennington County. For a small, quiet mouse of dense grassy cover, that says more about how rarely anyone looks than about where the mouse lives, and a county without records shouldn’t be read as a county without mice.
That report is dated July. One date can’t describe a season, though the mouse stays active whenever the ground isn’t frozen.
NatureServe ranks the mouse S4, apparently secure in South Dakota, and its taste for tall and mixed grass gives it room across much of the state. The refuge country of the northeast, places like Sand Lake and Waubay, holds exactly the kind of dense grassland it wants, even though the one recent record comes from the west. The gap between where it should be and where it’s been recorded is mostly an invitation to look.
Full species profile
