The Wyoming ground squirrel is a rodent of Colorado’s high country. Open occurrence databases hold 1,662 records for it in Colorado, most of them iNaturalist photos, and at 1,197 it carries one of the fuller photo records among the state’s ground squirrels.
A colonial squirrel of the mountain parks
This is a high-elevation animal, not a plains one. It forms colonies in the grassy mountain parks, sagebrush flats, and subalpine meadows of the central and northern mountains, where a scatter of burrow mouths and an upright sentinel or two mark an active town. Records concentrate in Larimer, Park, Grand, and Jackson counties, with a strong showing in Rocky Mountain National Park and around Florissant Fossil Beds. Plain grayish-buff and lacking the bold back stripes of its plains cousin, it is best told by its habitat and its colonial, park-dwelling ways rather than by any single field mark.
The shortest season of any
Few Colorado mammals spend so little of the year aboveground. Adults emerge in spring, race through mating, feeding, and raising a litter, and are back below by late summer, entering a hibernation that can stretch across two-thirds of the year. The record shows it starkly: observations surge for a few short months and then fall to nothing, so a meadow alive with squirrels in July can look empty by September. That is not the colony leaving, it is the colony gone to ground early.
Status in Colorado
The Wyoming ground squirrel is native and secure here, ranked S5 by NatureServe and least concern by the IUCN. Its Colorado range centers on the mountain parks, which makes the state’s high basins the core of where a visitor is likely to encounter one.
Full species profile
