Tennessee holds just 32 records of the southern red-backed vole, all logged through GBIF, making it one of the more thinly documented small mammals in the state’s mountain forests.
A relict of cooler, damper ground
This vole needs cool, moist forest floor, tucked under logs, rootballs, and mossy cover rather than open ground. In the southern Appalachians, that kind of habitat survives mostly at high elevation, so Tennessee’s red-backed voles cling to the same cool, spruce-fir and northern hardwood forest atop the Smokies and Unakas that shelters the state’s red squirrels, a leftover pocket of northern forest rather than a statewide range.
An unlikely gardener of the forest floor
It eats fungi and lichen alongside green plant material, including the underground fruiting bodies of fungi that partner with tree roots. Its droppings carry viable fungal spores to new ground, helping those root-partner fungi spread through the forest it lives in, a small mammal doing outsized work for the health of the trees around it.
Status in Tennessee
NatureServe ranks the southern red-backed vole S4, Apparently Secure, and lists it as native to Tennessee. USGS NAS doesn’t list it as nonindigenous in the state.
Full species profile
