The western heather vole is a small mammal in Colorado. Open occurrence databases hold 204 records for it here, drawn almost entirely from museum specimens and high-country trapping surveys rather than field photographs.
A vole of the high country
The western heather vole lives near the top of the mountains, at and above timberline where forest breaks into stunted krummholz, willow thickets, and low shrub-heath beside rockpiles and meltwater. It is a modest grey-brown vole that caches food and dens in shallow burrows among roots and stones. Its Colorado records trace the high ranges, with the northern Front Range around Boulder and Larimer counties, the central mountains around Pitkin, and the San Juans of the southwest all represented, wherever subalpine shrub and timberline habitat runs.
Active through the alpine winter
Heather voles do not hibernate. They stay active all year, moving through runways beneath deep, insulating snow and shifting from a summer diet of green plants, seeds, and berries to bark and buds in the cold months. The record leans heavily on warm-season survey work at high elevation, when the snow is gone and crews can trap the talus edges, so the seasonal pattern reflects access to the alpine far more than the vole’s own calendar.
Status in Colorado
NatureServe ranks the western heather vole S4, apparently secure, in Colorado, G5 globally, and the IUCN lists it as least concern. It is native and secure, but it lives where few people go and leaves almost no photographic trail, so even a stable high-mountain animal is known here mainly through the specimens biologists collect.
Full species profile
