SPRINGFIELD | A conservation group is hoping to draw attention to a rare mammal living along a bike trail in Springfield in hopes of improving its chances for survival.

The Franklin's ground squirrel, known from only a handful of locations in Illinois, persists along the trail within sight of businesses like Menards and Bed, Bath & Beyond.

The sighting of a rodent, however rare, doesn't often lead to the kind of excited phone call made last July by Vern LaGesse, president of Friends of the Sangamon Valley, an environmental stewardship organization and land trust.

"I'm sitting next to the bike trail in a lawn chair watching a Franklin's ground squirrel," LaGesse reported to his wife, Charlene Falco.

He was following up on a report from Falco, who thought she saw one while riding her bike on the trail.

Franklin's ground squirrels were thought to be a prairie species that disappeared along with the grasslands that once covered 60 percent of Illinois.

But today, scientists like Ed Heske, a mammalogist with the Illinois Natural History Survey in Champaign, aren't so sure. Especially when the rare critters turn up along roads, bike paths and railroad right-of-ways that have little or no prairie left.

Heske said the ground squirrels seem to prefer open grassland with grass knee-high or higher and scattered trees.

Central Illinois is at the southeastern end of the squirrel's range, which extends northwest through the Great Plains and into Canada. It is listed as a threatened species in Illinois.

Jenny Duggan, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois researching Franklin's ground squirrels, said she knows of only a few locations where live ground squirrels have been found in the past five years in the state.

"It's a pretty big deal what you've got there in Springfield," she said. "They are really hard to find."