The southern bog lemming favors damp meadows, bog edges, and thick, mossy ground cover rather than deep forest, and it gets around by cutting short grass runways through vegetation instead of digging the extensive burrow systems true voles rely on. Its 102 Ohio records skew toward sites like Cuyahoga Valley National Park with the right wet, grassy understory.
Records drop to almost nothing in July, an odd gap for a small rodent, then pick back up through fall and winter. Ohio hasn’t assigned the species a numeric NatureServe rank (SNR, unranked), and its patchy, damp-habitat needs likely explain the record pattern better than any change in observer effort.
Full species profile
