White-throated woodrats build stick-and-cactus middens that can stand for generations, and Texas’s records trace the isolated desert mountain ranges of the Trans-Pecos, Big Bend, the Guadalupe Mountains, and the Davis Mountains, where rocky slopes and scattered woodland give the species both building material and shelter from summer heat.
The record itself is thin and old: 343 Texas entries, almost all from specimen data rather than photographs, and the most recent dates back to 2009. That gap says more about how rarely this nocturnal desert rodent gets surveyed in remote mountain country than about whether it still lives there, since a midden can persist and get reused long after anyone photographs the animal that built it. Monthly counts stay fairly flat across the year with no real peak, another sign of a thin dataset rather than an even spread. No NatureServe state rank is on file for Texas, though the species is treated as native to its mapped range here.
Full species profile
