The southern plains woodrat is among the most seldom-recorded mammals in Colorado. Just 120 records exist statewide, only 1 of them an iNaturalist photo, and its entire documented Colorado range sits in one corner of the state.
A packrat of the southeastern plains
This grey, blunt-faced woodrat belongs to the shortgrass and shrub country of far southeastern Colorado, with the great majority of its records from Baca County and the neighboring plains of Bent and Las Animas. It is a true packrat: it heaps a bulky house of sticks, cactus pads, and debris at the base of a cholla or shrub, sometimes several feet across, and generations of woodrats tend and enlarge the same midden.
Why the records are so thin
The woodrat is nocturnal and stays close to its house, so it is easily missed even where it is well established, and in Colorado it only ever occupied a narrow band of warm plains at the northern edge of its range. That combination of a small range and a secretive, den-bound life keeps it low in the record all year; it neither migrates nor hibernates.
A species to watch
NatureServe ranks the southern plains woodrat vulnerable in Colorado, the most cautious status among the state’s plains rodents. Its dependence on a single arid corner and on undisturbed shrubland makes the Colorado population genuinely small, not merely under-observed.
Full species profile
