The March 2006 issue of the free environmental paper South Sound Green Pages has a good article on a local critter I'd never heard of, the Mazama Pocket Gopher.

Mazama Pocket Gophers are now listed as a Washington State Threatened Species.

The Washington population of the Mazama pocket gopher became a candidate for federal listing under the Endangered Species Act in 2002. Mazama pocket gophers are known to persist at 27 sites scattered across the southern Puget Sound grasslands and alpine meadows of the Olympics. These may total in the low thousands, but many are small populations on marginal sites that are unlikely to persist.

Pocket gophers play an important a role in ecological communities by altering soil structure and chemistry, affecting plant occurrences, and serving as prey for many predators; their burrows provide a retreat for a wide variety of other species, including the western toad.