Endangered
Northern Idaho ground squirrel
Urocitellus brunneus
Northern Idaho ground squirrel is a rodent in the family Sciuridae (order Rodentia) — Urocitellus brunneus, recorded as Endangered and tied to United States.
Appearance
Some of the northern Idaho ground squirrel's qualities include tan feet and ears, a tail, a brownish-grey throat, and a white eye ring. The northern Idaho ground squirrel has sexual dimorphism and a dark-reddish gray coat.
Their weight ranges from 120 to 290 grams, and they are, on average, 233 mm in length, though their range is 209 mm to 258 mm.
Range and habitat
The habitat of the northern Idaho ground squirrel consists of dry rocky meadows. Ground with deep soil and scattered with ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir forests at the elevation between 915 and 1,650 meters is the preferred habitat of the squirrels. Original vegetation in the NIDGS was big sage brush, bitterbrush, native bunch grasses, and forbs, but now the area usually lives in dominated by cheatgrass and medusahead.During the winter, the NIDGS hibernates in environments with larger coverage compared to the active season habitats.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Their diet consists of mostly forbs, grasses, shrubs, trees, rushes, and sedges. The species constructs three types of burrows: nest burrows, auxiliary burrows, and hibernation burrows.
Nest burrows are for mating and raising young. They are usually 5–120 cm deep, with 3-11 surface openings, 2-13 branching tunnels, and 1-7 chambers; in well-drained soil the nest is in the deepest part of the burrow. The auxiliary ("escape") burrows do not contain nests. They are linear, less than 50 cm, built 100 m from nest burrows, and are constructed in shallow soils.
In crisis
In 2000, the species was classified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act mostly due to habitat loss. There are about 2000 individuals remaining, but the population is increasing resulting from conservation efforts. A recovery plan for the species was put in place by the U.S.
The main cause for the decreasing population of the species is habitat loss. The Native Americans set fires to these forests, that introduced more open terrain in the forests for the squirrels to roam and allowed young trees to infill the meadows they inhabit.
Northern Idaho ground squirrel is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Northern Idaho ground squirrel, Wikidata item Q21730347. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
