Wyoming’s occurrence data holds 521 southern red-backed vole records, every one of them a GBIF specimen entry rather than a photographed iNaturalist sighting. That split alone says a lot about this species: it’s a forest-floor rodent that field crews trap far more often than hikers ever spot.
A specialist of cool, mossy forest
This vole needs damp, shaded ground with plenty of downed logs and deep leaf litter, the kind of understory found in Wyoming’s conifer forests around Yellowstone and the Bighorn Mountains. It eats fungi, lichens, and green plants rather than caching seeds, foraging low in the same rotting wood and moss that keeps it hidden. Wyoming’s open sagebrush country, which covers most of the state including the Red Desert and Great Divide Basin, offers none of that cover, which is likely the main reason this species sits in the state’s rare bucket for recorded sightings.
A single trapping season, not year-round activity
Nearly half the state’s records, 256 of 521, land in September alone, with almost nothing recorded from October through May. That pattern almost certainly reflects when small-mammal trapping surveys run their lines in Wyoming’s forests, not a vole that disappears for eight months of the year.
Status in Wyoming
NatureServe ranks the southern red-backed vole S5, Secure, and it’s native to Wyoming. Its low record count is a function of how rarely this forest-floor specialist gets trapped or seen, not a sign of how many are actually out there.
Full species profile
