Big brown bats are among the most adaptable bats in North America, roosting in tree cavities and rock crevices just as readily as in barns, attics, and bridges. That flexibility shows in Kansas’s where-to-see list: state parks, wooded river corridors, and tallgrass prairie remnants all turn up records, spanning the eastern prairie-forest transition and the Flint Hills.
The record set here leans heavily on GBIF, 1,121 entries against 97 from iNaturalist, typical for a nocturnal insect-eater identified mostly through acoustic surveys and museum specimens rather than photographs. Reports come in most months but rise through summer and peak in August at 15, which likely reflects when researchers run bat surveys and young bats start flying independently, not that the species disappears the rest of the year; it’s recorded here year-round.
NatureServe lists big brown bats as secure throughout Kansas, and a percentile ranking of 54.5 puts them squarely in the middle of the state’s tracked mammals.
Full species profile
