Records of the silky pocket mouse in New Mexico run overwhelmingly through GBIF specimen data: barely thirty iNaturalist observations sit inside a state total above 4,200. That split fits one of North America’s smallest rodents, easy to miss even standing right next to its burrow, so its documented presence depends far more on trap lines and museum collections than on anyone spotting it in the open. Only one named site, Gila National Forest, turns up in the location data, and even there with a single logged record, a reminder of how thinly this mouse’s presence is tied to any particular park boundary.
Reports build through spring, spike in August, and fall away by winter, a pattern shaped by when field surveys ran rather than by a late-summer rise in the population. NatureServe still ranks the species S5, secure across New Mexico, matching a wide-ranging seed-eater of sandy grassland and desert scrub that needs little beyond loose soil and scattered cover to persist.
Full species profile
