7:36 In the traps were the wrong kinds of mice and chipmunks — species that should have been living further south, according to all the records he could find.
“That kind of woke us up,” Myers says. “I realized it’s a bunch of southern species coming in, becoming really common, and a bunch of northern things disappearing.”
Myers has since retired, but for decades he was a professor and curator at the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan. He first noticed this trend in small mammals back in the 1980s, and it’s only continued.
Southern flying squirrels are displacing northern flying squirrels across much of the upper Midwest. Eastern chipmunks and opossums are showing up in greater numbers where they once never lived. Critters that were common in the northern woods, like red-backed voles and woodland jumping mice, are disappearing from their southern ranges.