The Wyoming pocket gopher is one of the most narrowly documented mammals in the state. There are 20 records in the modern window, 13 of them from Natrona County. Sweetwater and Carbon trail at 3 apiece, and Fremont holds a lone record. This is a creature of the central Wyoming basins. It’s known from sagebrush country along the Sweetwater and North Platte drainages, and essentially nowhere else.
The record has also gone quiet. The most recent observation in the set dates to August 2017. The dated entries lean heavily on July field work. A burrowing animal doesn’t vanish from its burrows, and pocket gophers are easy to miss when nobody is trapping. Still, nearly a decade without a fresh entry is a long silence. NatureServe ranks the species critically imperiled in Wyoming even as the global IUCN listing calls it Least Concern. A record this old and this sparse does nothing to settle that gap. A verified report from anywhere in the central basins would be genuine news.
Full species profile
