Red tree voles spend almost their entire lives high in Douglas-fir canopy, rarely if ever touching the ground, building nests from resin ducts and needles and eating almost nothing but conifer needles, a diet no other Oregon mammal relies on so completely. That canopy-bound lifestyle is exactly why the species is so hard to document, and Oregon’s own S2, imperiled, rank, alongside a G2 global rank and an IUCN Near Threatened listing, reflects genuine concern over old-growth habitat loss rather than just thin survey coverage.
Records scatter across January, April, and September with no dominant peak, and 14 of the 15 are iNaturalist observations, a thin total for an animal whose nest sits dozens of feet up in a conifer canopy, hard to spot even for a trained observer.
Full species profile
