The star-nosed mole is one of the harder Minnesota mammals to catch on camera. Open databases hold 177 Minnesota records, and every one of them is a GBIF specimen or survey entry rather than a photographed iNaturalist sighting, which isn’t surprising for a species that spends nearly its whole life underground or underwater.
A mole built for wet ground, from bogs to spring creeks
Twenty-two fleshy touch rays ring its nose, and the mole uses them to sort real food from mud and water almost instantly, letting it hunt places most moles can’t: streambanks, marsh edges, and flooded forest floor. Minnesota’s confirmed records cluster in the bogs and beaver ponds of Superior National Forest in the Arrowhead, and in the wet meadows and oak-savanna wetlands of Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge farther south, but the same cold, spring-fed stream habitat runs through the Driftless Area in the state’s southeastern corner too.
Recorded almost every month, dug in the rest of the time
Minnesota records turn up in every month of the year, which fits a mole that doesn’t slow down in winter: it keeps tunneling under snow and sometimes swims beneath lake and stream ice to hunt. Records still thin out in early spring, more likely a gap in survey effort during snowmelt and high water than any real pause in the mole’s activity.
Status in Minnesota
NatureServe lists the star-nosed mole as native to Minnesota. It carries no assigned conservation rank there, marked SNR for unranked, and its outlook tracks the health of the wetlands and streams it depends on more closely than any hunting or land-use pressure aimed at the mole itself.
