Animals & Plants of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve
The 36 animals, plants, and fungi you can find at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, with sizes, diets, and whether you should worry. See the full park guide at Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.
Great Sand Dunes runs from grassland and wetland up through the tallest dunes in North America to alpine peaks, so its species list is wider than the sand suggests. The Great Sand Dunes tiger beetle lives on the dunes and nowhere else, sandhill cranes stop in the valley wetlands, and Abert's squirrels and pinyon jays work the pinyon and ponderosa woods on the edge.
Common questions
Which Great Sand Dunes animals need the most room?
At Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, give space to Mountain lion and Bullsnake. Mountain lion: Confrontations are very rare — even in Yellowstone, with a healthy population, few have ever been documented. Bullsnake: Not dangerous at all — it has no venom. (per NPS species pages).
What do the Great Sand Dunes animals eat?
At Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, the most interesting eaters are Mountain lion, Bald eagle, Golden eagle, and Clark's nutcracker. Mountain lion eats elk, deer, marmots, porcupines. Bald eagle eats fish, ducks, gulls, small mammals, carrion. Golden eagle eats rabbits, hares, ground squirrels, marmots, ptarmigan. Clark's nutcracker eats pine seeds, whitebark pine seeds, insects, berries, small animals. (per NPS species pages).
Which Great Sand Dunes species has the strangest true fact?
The strangest true thing about Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve: Bullsnake: A bullsnake has no rattle and no venom, but it can hiss, flatten its head, and shake its tail in dead grass well enough to fool people into thinking it's a rattlesnake. Great Sand Dunes tiger beetle: This beetle is one of at least seven kinds of insect found only at Great Sand Dunes and nowhere else on the planet. (per NPS species pages).
Anything here that bites?
Keep away
- Mountain lion: Confrontations are very rare — even in Yellowstone, with a healthy population, few have ever been documented.
Don't touch or eat
- American pasqueflower: Every part of this plant is poisonous to eat, and the fresh sap can blister skin.
- Great Plains toad: Not dangerous if you leave it alone.
- Plains spadefoot: Not dangerous.
Bites if handled
- Abert's squirrel: Harmless and shy.
- Bald eagle: A bald eagle will not come after you.
- Bullsnake: Not dangerous at all — it has no venom.
- Golden eagle: A golden eagle will not come after a person.
- Golden-mantled ground squirrel: None.
- Great horned owl: This owl hunts small animals at night and will not come after you.
- Great Sand Dunes tiger beetle: Harmless to people.
- Greater short-horned lizard: Not dangerous.
- Red-tailed hawk: None.
- Sandhill crane: A sandhill crane is big but shy and will usually walk away from people.
- Townsend's big-eared bat: Bats are not out to hurt you, and they are not 'flying mice' or blind.
- Turkey vulture: None directly — it eats only dead animals and avoids people.
- Western terrestrial garter snake: Essentially harmless.
- Yellow-bellied marmot: Marmots are not dangerous, but they are wild and can bite if you corner or try to grab one.
Everything else on this page is harmless. What each group means.
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Mammal Abert's squirrel
Sciurus aberti
A tasseled-eared squirrel of ponderosa pine forests at Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, and Great Sand Dunes, nicknamed the scrabbit.
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Plant American pasqueflower
Pulsatilla patens ssp. multifida
A furry, purple-blue prairie flower that beats the grass out of the ground each spring, blooming before almost anything else is green.
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Bird Bald eagle
Haliaeetus leucocephalus
The white-headed fish hawk that is the national bird of the United States, common along the lakes of Voyageurs and the coasts of Olympic and Katmai.
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Amphibian Barred tiger salamander
Ambystoma mavortium
A stout, yellow-barred salamander that spends most of the year underground and gathers in prairie ponds to breed, living around Great Sand Dunes and Badlands.
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Bird Black-billed magpie
Pica hudsonia
A black-and-white corvid with a tail as long as its body, common on fences and roadsides across the northern Rockies and Great Plains.
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Amphibian Boreal chorus frog
Pseudacris maculata
A finger-sized frog whose spring trill fills Rocky Mountain wetlands, and whose cells can freeze solid and still wake up.
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Fish Brook trout
Salvelinus fontinalis
A small, wormy-patterned native fish with red spots ringed in blue, the only trout that truly belongs in the cold high streams of the Smokies and Shenandoah.
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Reptile Bullsnake
Pituophis catenifer sayi
A big, harmless snake that fakes being a rattlesnake — hissing, flattening its head, and shaking its tail in dry grass — to talk its way out of trouble.
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Bird Clark's nutcracker
Nucifraga columbiana
A pale-gray, black-winged cousin of the crow that hides tens of thousands of pine seeds each fall and remembers where to find them again.
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Plant Colorado blue columbine
Aquilegia coerulea
Colorado's blue-and-white state flower, its long spurs full of nectar that only a hawkmoth's tongue can reach.
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Bird Common raven
Corvus corax
A big, glossy-black problem-solver that rolls and tumbles over the cliffs of Grand Canyon, Arches, and the desert parks, watching for its next meal.
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Plant Engelmann spruce
Picea engelmannii
A high-elevation spruce with scaly bark and sharp, squarish needles, whose Colorado stands have lost more than a million acres to a beetle since 1996.
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Plant Fireweed
Chamerion angustifolium
A tall pink-purple wildflower that is often the first color to return to a burned mountainside.
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Bird Golden eagle
Aquila chrysaetos
A dark brown eagle with golden neck feathers that hunts rabbits and hares across open country, nesting on cliffs in Denali, Death Valley, and Great Basin.
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Mammal Golden-mantled ground squirrel
Callospermophilus lateralis
A chipmunk-lookalike ground squirrel with a reddish-gold head and shoulders and no face stripes, common on rocks and trailsides from Glacier to Mesa Verde.
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Bird Great horned owl
Bubo virginianus
A big night hunter with feathery "horns" and a deep hoot, found from the saguaro desert to the Everglades, hunting after dark on silent wings.
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Amphibian Great Plains toad
Anaxyrus cognatus
A warty prairie toad that rises from the ground by the thousands after summer rain to fill Great Sand Dunes with a buzzing, metallic trill.
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Invertebrate Great Sand Dunes tiger beetle
Cicindela theatina
A beetle found nowhere else on Earth but the Great Sand Dunes, hunting ants and mites across the open sand in a coat with a violin-shaped pattern.
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Reptile Greater short-horned lizard
Phrynosoma hernandesi
A flat, spiky, dirt-colored lizard, sometimes called a horned toad, that can squirt blood from its eyes at a coyote and gives birth to live young.
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Bird Killdeer
Charadrius vociferus
A shorebird that lives nowhere near a shore. At Badlands we never saw one. We heard it call its own name across the campground.
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Bird Mountain bluebird
Sialia currucoides
A sky-blue thrush of high, open country, the only bluebird seen regularly above 5,000 feet, nesting in lava-rock crevices at Craters of the Moon.
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Mammal Mountain lion
Puma concolor
A tan, solitary big cat found from Glacier to Mesa Verde, called cougar, puma, or panther by region, and rarely seen at all.
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Bird Pinyon jay
Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus
A dusty-blue crow relative that travels Mesa Verde and Black Canyon in loud flocks, burying pine seeds it will dig up again later.
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Amphibian Plains spadefoot
Spea bombifrons
A cat-eyed toad that digs backward into sand with a spade on each hind foot and spends nearly all year hidden underground.
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Bird Red-tailed hawk
Buteo jamaicensis
The hawk most often recorded in Yellowstone. We watched a hawk take a pika near the Roosevelt cabins and could not tell you which hawk it was.
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Bird Rufous hummingbird
Selasphorus rufus
A copper-orange hummingbird that flies farther, relative to its size, than almost any other bird on Earth, from Mexico to Alaska and back every year.
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Bird Sandhill crane
Antigone canadensis
A tall gray wading bird with a red forehead and a bugling call, gathering by the thousands near Great Sand Dunes and standing year-round in the Everglades.
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Bird Steller's jay
Cyanocitta stelleri
A deep-blue mountain jay with a black crest and a loud voice, the campground bird that will eye your sandwich at Yosemite, Sequoia, and Crater Lake.
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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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Bird Turkey vulture
Cathartes aura
A large, dark soaring bird with a bare red head, circling on thermals over open country, using one of the sharpest noses of any bird.
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Plant Two-needle pinyon
Pinus edulis
A short, gnarled pine of the drier Southwest, growing at Mesa Verde, Black Canyon, and Great Sand Dunes, with nuts a jay plants by forgetting them.
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Bird Western meadowlark
Sturnella neglecta
A grassland songbird with a yellow throat and a black V on its chest, the state bird of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota.
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Reptile Western terrestrial garter snake
Thamnophis elegans
A slim, striped snake found from stream banks to talus slopes across ten of these parks, and the most commonly seen reptile in several of them.
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Plant Western wheatgrass
Pascopyrum smithii
A blue-green prairie grass whose underground rhizomes weave a tough sod — the official state grass of North and South Dakota.
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Bird White-tailed ptarmigan
Lagopus leucura
A small alpine grouse that turns pure white in winter and nearly vanishes against rock and snow above treeline in the Rockies.
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Mammal Yellow-bellied marmot
Marmota flaviventris
A chubby, whistling ground squirrel that suns itself on high-country rocks at Rocky Mountain and Yosemite, and sleeps away most of the year.