Wyoming’s prairie shrew file is 14 records deep, and 11 of them come from one corner. Crook County, in the Black Hills country of the state’s northeast, holds those 11. Weston and Johnson, its neighbors along the same uplift, hold the rest. Yellowstone and the Bighorns draw the naturalist traffic. The state’s entire documented record for this species sits in the grassland and pine fringe of one northeastern region.
July accounts for 12 of the dated reports. At numbers this small, that probably marks one or two productive survey seasons rather than a real seasonal preference; shrews are active all year. NatureServe ranks the species imperiled in Wyoming. With a file this thin, the grade reads as ‘rarely encountered’ rather than ‘known to be declining.’ The honest summary: the prairie shrew is confirmed in northeast Wyoming and effectively unmapped everywhere else in the state.
Full species profile
