Wyoming has no silky pocket mouse records from 2000 to 2026. Its older specimen records lean on Converse County, where Thunder Basin National Grassland spreads sandy grassland and sagebrush across the state’s northeast quarter. This is one of the smallest rodents in North America, a night-working seed collector lighter than two nickels, and Wyoming marks the northern edge of its range.
Soft fur, sandy floor
The silky pocket mouse earns its name from an unusually smooth, soft coat, and its living from sand. It needs loose, diggable soil for its burrows and open ground with scattered grass and shrubs for foraging. Like its relatives, it carries seeds home in fur-lined cheek pouches that open outside the mouth, keeping the harvest dry until it’s cached underground. Thunder Basin’s mix of sandy prairie and stream corridors is the closest thing Wyoming has to classic habitat, and the older records there reflect it.
A warm-season animal
Pocket mice ride out the coldest stretches in torpor below ground, so any future Wyoming records would lean on the warm months, when the year’s young are out on their own and traplines are running.
Status in Wyoming
NatureServe ranks the species S3, vulnerable, in Wyoming, while globally it’s considered secure. It’s native here, and older single records from Natrona, Sweetwater, and Albany counties hint it could turn up in any of the state’s sandy basins where nobody has yet run a trapline. An empty modern record can’t say how many mice there are; it only shows that nobody has reported one from Wyoming’s northern outpost since 2000.
Full species profile
