West Virginia’s star-nosed mole records cluster in the Allegheny highlands, around Monongahela National Forest, New River Gorge, and Blackwater Falls State Park, where boggy spruce forest, wet meadows, and cold headwater streams give this mole the saturated ground it needs.
It hunts through wet soil and shallow water using a ring of touch-sensitive rays around its nose, checking each texture almost instantly for worms, insects, and other small prey, and it’s a capable swimmer that forages underwater as readily as underground.
Records here are rare, with reports concentrated from May through August. Wetland access and how much digging or trapping effort goes into a spot shape what gets reported more than any true shift in the mole’s own habits. West Virginia sits near the southern edge of a range centered on the Northeast and Great Lakes, so scattered records like these are expected rather than a sign of decline.
