New Mexico’s 5 confirmed records of the southern red-backed vole never touch the same county twice: Otero, Bernalillo, Socorro, Taos, and Catron each hold exactly one. The named sites point the same direction, Sandia Mountain Wilderness above Albuquerque and Columbine-Hondo Wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo range. Every record comes off a mountain.
A mountaintop vole at its southern limit
Read that map against the species’ needs and it sharpens. This is a vole of cool, shaded forest floor, and in New Mexico those conditions exist only as islands, the high, timbered ranges that rise out of the desert basins. Each confirmed record marks one of those islands at what is close to the species’ southern limit anywhere. Five records can’t say how many islands it actually occupies; they say only that where someone has looked in the right high country, it has turned up.
Vulnerable in the state, and mostly unsearched
NatureServe ranks the species S3 in New Mexico, vulnerable. The low wetland ground that draws the state’s wildlife watchers, Bosque del Apache, the Rio Grande corridor, Bitter Lake, sits thousands of feet below the habitat this vole uses, and none of it has produced a record. For a high-forest animal in a desert state, the gap between 5 records and a real distribution is a survey problem, and the calendar gives no help either: the dated records scatter across January, May, July, August, and September.
Full species profile
