The southern grasshopper mouse earned a “wolf mouse” nickname for good reason: it hunts insects, scorpions, and even other mice, and it rears up to give a thin nighttime howl to mark territory. Every one of its 230 New Mexico records comes from GBIF specimen data rather than iNaturalist photographs, a sign of how rarely this after-dark hunter gets caught on camera.
Records cluster near White Sands National Park, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, and Carlsbad Caverns National Park, all Chihuahuan Desert country with the scrub and open ground this mouse hunts across. Reports rise in October and again in December, but with counts this small, a couple of active surveys can swing the pattern, so the timing says more about fieldwork than about the animal’s real activity.
NatureServe ranks the species S3, Vulnerable, in New Mexico, a more cautious status than its globally secure IUCN listing suggests.
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