Until the present time, Sorex merriami was represented in California only by a skin and skull from Siskiyou County, and two incomplete skulls from owl pellets collected in Modoc County. These three specimens are all of the race S. m. merriami Dobson (Benson and Bond, Jour. Mamm., 20: 348–351, 1939). The first specimen of the subspecies S. m. leucogenys Osgood to be recorded from the state was trapped on June 29, 1954, at Cottonwood Creek in the White Mountains of Mono County, California. It is an adult male, and is the second complete specimen of S. merriami to be taken in the state. It was caught on the floor of the valley (9500 ft. elevation) in a fairly dense stand of sagebrush, about two hundred yards from Cottonwood Creek. The adjacent steep slopes support mountain mahogany and sagebrush on the southerly exposures, and bristlecone pine, limber pine, and juniper on the northerly.
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Robert S. Hoffman (1955) studied this question.