Records of the yellow-nosed cotton rat in New Mexico sit almost entirely at the southern edge of the state, near White Sands National Park, Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. That clustering fits a species whose US range barely crosses the border from Mexico into the desert grasslands of the Southwest.
The 73 known records are thin and spread unevenly through the year, with modest upticks in January and again in October and November, but no month holds a strong majority of sightings. NatureServe ranks the species S2, Imperiled, in New Mexico, a sharper conservation concern than its globally secure IUCN status suggests. None of the state’s records come from iNaturalist; every one is a GBIF specimen entry, so this is a rat New Mexico knows mostly from trapping surveys, not photographs.
Full species profile
