The yellow-faced pocket gopher is a mammal in the Colorado record. Open occurrence databases hold 182 records for it, nearly all from trapping surveys and museum specimens. A burrowing animal that rarely surfaces leaves next to no photographic trace.
A gopher of the southeastern plains
The yellow-faced pocket gopher is a stout, powerfully built burrower with a broad head, big foreclaws, and a nearly bare tail, named for the warm buff wash across its face. It needs deep, workable soil, so in Colorado it belongs to the sandy and gravelly ground of the far southeast. Its records cluster in Las Animas, Baca, Pueblo, and Huerfano counties and the surrounding shortgrass plains and river valleys, thinning fast toward the northern and western edges of that country.
A life spent underground
This gopher lives almost its entire life below the surface, cutting extensive tunnel systems with its claws and teeth, feeding on roots and tubers it reaches from below, and betraying its presence mainly through the fan-shaped mounds of fresh soil it pushes up. It works its burrows year-round and seldom emerges into the open. Because so few are ever seen alive, its Colorado record is essentially a map of where biologists have trapped and collected rather than a measure of how often it appears, and long quiet stretches mark gaps between surveys, not the animal’s absence.
Status in Colorado
NatureServe ranks the yellow-faced pocket gopher S4, apparently secure, in Colorado, G5 globally, and the IUCN lists it as least concern. It is native and not considered at risk, but its thin tally measures how completely it stays hidden: a common enough resident of the southeastern soils that almost never shows itself above ground.
Full species profile
