BACKYARD NATURE HOME | WHO WE ARE
PLANTS | ANIMALS | ECOLOGY | FUNGI | GEOLOGY | GARDENING | TOOLS  

A good way to get a handle on the mammals in your home area is to thumb through a good field guide with distribution maps for each species, and list the species the maps indicate may appear in or very near your home. These words were written in California's Sierra Nevada Foothills, so below is a list of that area's mammals, according to maps in Burt & Grossenheider's A Field Guide to the Mammals : North America North of Mexico.

Many of the names are preceded by a "?." That indicates that on the maps the location under consideration was at the very edge of the area of distribution, so it was unclear whether the species was found there. One problem was that the location was on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where certain species may have been found just a few miles downslope in the hot, semi-arid conditions of the Central Valley, or the cold, alpine conditions upslope, but never at that particular spot.