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 nearly all of them come from GBIF specimen data rather than photographs, since spotting a nest built dozens of feet up in a conifer canopy is difficult even for a trained observer.
Full species profile
