When you think of pocket gophers, you may think of their holes covering large swaths of land. But in Wyoming’s Red Desert there’s a very rare species of pocket gopher and an environmental group is concerned it could soon become extinct.
This week, WildEarth Guardians filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have the Wyoming pocket gopher listed as endangered. Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist for the group and he says the problem is that the species only lives in a specific brush called the Gardner's saltbush.
“This is a very powerfully built species for digging,” he says. “And they have tiny little colonies. The colonies can be as small as one acre in size for an entire colony of Wyoming pocket gophers. If you can imagine a six or eleven acre well pad could easily wipe out a colony if it was poorly placed.”
Molvar says sage grouse is a good umbrella species for lots of other wildlife if they live inside the bird’s protected area where oil and gas drilling isn’t allowed. But he says the Wyoming pocket gopher doesn’t live in the same habitat as sage grouse and that’s why it needs its own protections.
