Mammals of Badlands National Park
The 14 mammals you can find at Badlands National Park, like the American badger — sizes, diets, and whether you should worry.
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Mammal American badger
Taxidea taxus
A short, wide-bodied digger with a white-striped face, common on the grasslands of Yellowstone and Badlands, that can vanish underground in minutes.
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Mammal American bison
Bison bison
The biggest land animal in North America, a shaggy grazer of the plains you can watch cross the road in Yellowstone.
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Mammal Bighorn sheep
Ovis canadensis
A wild sheep of cliffs and canyons, where rams carry heavy curled horns and both sexes cross steep rock other animals can't.
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Mammal Black-footed ferret
Mustela nigripes
A masked, prairie-dog-hunting weasel declared extinct in 1979, brought back from a single Wyoming colony and now living wild again at Badlands and Wind Cave.
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Mammal Black-tailed prairie dog
Cynomys ludovicianus
A burrowing ground squirrel, not a dog. Its towns along Theodore Roosevelt's scenic loop mow the grass short and pull bison and pronghorn in to graze.
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Mammal Bobcat
Lynx rufus
A small wildcat about twice the size of a house cat, common but rarely seen, that can bring down prey many times its own weight.
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Mammal Coyote
Canis latrans
The wild dog you're most likely to hear at a national park — a coyote, at home in the desert, the mountains, and the edges of towns.
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Mammal Little brown bat
Myotis lucifugus
A tiny brown flyer that hunts insects over water at dusk and sleeps in caves and barns, eating half its own weight in bugs each night.
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Mammal Mule deer
Odocoileus hemionus
A western deer named for its big mule-like ears, common along canyon rims and desert washes in Grand Canyon, Zion, Yosemite, and Saguaro.
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Mammal North American porcupine
Erethizon dorsatum
A slow, quill-covered rodent that climbs into the treetops at Theodore Roosevelt to eat twigs, and North America's second-largest rodent after the beaver.
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Mammal Pronghorn
Antilocapra americana
North America's fastest land mammal, seen in Yellowstone's northern range and at Lava Beds, built to outrun a predator that went extinct 12,000 years ago.
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Mammal Swift fox
Vulpes velox
A cat-sized fox of the shortgrass prairie, wiped out of South Dakota for most of the twentieth century and reintroduced to Badlands starting in 2003.
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Mammal Townsend's big-eared bat
Corynorhinus townsendii
A soft brown bat with enormous curling ears that roosts in the cool lava-tube caves of Lava Beds and hunts moths in the dark.
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Mammal White-tailed deer
Odocoileus virginianus
The most common large mammal in eastern parks, running through the woods and waving a white tail like a flag when it bolts.