Star-nosed mole reports in North Carolina split across two very different landscapes. In the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains, they come from wet seeps and boggy soil at elevation. Farther east, the species turns up in Coastal Plain wetlands, including swampy edges near Cape Hatteras National Seashore and peaty habitat resembling the Great Dismal Swamp farther north. Damp bottomland in Uwharrie National Forest links the two regions, but the mapped clusters show where someone found a mole or its tunneling rather than the full extent of its range.
That patchiness fits how the animal spends its life. A star-nosed mole almost never surfaces on dry ground. It tunnels through saturated soil at the edge of streams and wetlands, and its burrows often open straight into the water, where it swims down to hunt worms, insect larvae, and small aquatic prey using the touch-sensitive rays ringing its nose. Finding one at all usually means someone stumbled on a burrow mound or caught a rare glimpse of it swimming, which is a big part of why records stay this thin even where the habitat looks good.
Records have come in at different times of year, and North Carolina’s mountain-to-coast elevation range means the mole can find the wet ground it needs at both ends of the state, just by different routes: cold seeps in the high country, warm swamp soil near the coast.
