The Amargosa Vole: A Small Rodent with Big Challenges in the Mojave Desert

In one of the hottest and driest regions of Southern California, the Amargosa vole—no bigger than a tennis ball—has made its home in the marshes along the Amargosa River.

These wetlands, nestled between the towns of Shoshone and Tecopa, are an unlikely sanctuary in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Here, the vole and a handful of other rare species find refuge in a landscape that seems to be doing its best to keep them out.

The vole, with its short tail and tiny ears, lives in small patches of bulrush marsh—some as small as an acre, others up to five acres in size. This is a highly specialized habitat, one that owes its existence to underground springs and aquifers, making it an oasis for creatures that call this area home.

For decades, the Amargosa vole has quietly scurried through this marshy landscape, living a relatively peaceful life. But the calm waters of this desert haven are starting to churn.

From “Extinct” to “Endangered”

The Amargosa vole had a rough start. Thought to be extinct by the early 1900s, it was rediscovered in the 1970s, just as researchers were starting to realize that this tiny rodent was holding onto life in a pretty precarious spot. By 2012, with a world population of just 50 to 75 individuals, the species was hanging on by a whisker. The vole’s main home, Borehole Marsh, was in decline, and the population was headed toward a grim future.

In fact, without intervention, the vole had an 82% chance of going extinct within five years. Yikes, right? But just when things looked their bleakest, help arrived. In 2013, a team of scientists, government agencies, and private landowners came together with a shared goal: to keep this tiny critter from vanishing entirely.

A Team Effort to Save the Vole

Since that initial scramble to save the vole, the Amargosa Vole Recovery Team has been working hard to turn things around. With partners ranging from UC Davis and UC Berkeley to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, this team has put in place some creative—and sometimes surprising—measures to give the vole a fighting chance.

One of their major breakthroughs has been a captive breeding program at UC Davis, where voles are carefully bred and studied before being reintroduced to the wild. On the ground, the team has been working to stabilize the vole’s marshy home by managing water resources and improving vegetation. They’ve also been busy creating new habitat on private lands, giving the voles more room to roam.

But water is the real key to the vole’s survival. The wetlands that the vole depends on are fed by an underground aquifer system that stretches across state lines into Nevada. Understanding the source of this water was crucial, so researchers from the BLM and U.S. Geological Survey took on a multi-year investigation to learn more about the aquifer’s hidden flow.

Their findings were a game-changer: most of the water comes from an ancient, underground system that’s been in place for thousands of years, feeding the marshes through artesian springs. With this knowledge in hand, the team now has a better sense of how to manage the water supply that sustains the vole’s habitat.

A Bit of Good News (and Hope)

So, how’s the vole doing now? Thanks to the recovery efforts, the vole population is finally on the upswing. The team’s hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed, either—by 2020, they earned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Recovery Champion Award for their efforts to conserve endangered species. But the road ahead is still long, and the threats are far from over.

Climate change, prolonged droughts, and continuing challenges around water security are all factors that could threaten the vole’s fragile habitat. The Mojave Desert is only expected to get hotter and drier in the coming decades, making the vole’s already tough life even more challenging. The recovery team knows they need to build resilience into the vole’s habitat to ensure that this small creature can continue to thrive, even in the face of these ongoing challenges.

Looking to the Future

While the future of the Amargosa vole remains uncertain, the hard work of the recovery team has given this little rodent a fighting chance. Plans are in place to secure water rights to protect the vole’s habitat and continue habitat restoration efforts. The team is also surveying the range to better understand the vole’s distribution, and they’re looking into ways to expand marshlands to give the voles more space to live.

The Amargosa vole might be small, but its survival is a big deal—both for the species and the ecosystem it helps sustain. With continued effort and collaboration, the hope is that this charismatic critter will keep scurrying along the Amargosa River for many years to come.