Big brown bat ranks nineteenth among Missouri’s recorded mammals and carries an S4 NatureServe status, apparently secure, in a state whose Ozark caves make it one of the more bat-friendly regions in the country. Mark Twain National Forest offers river-and-woodland flyways for foraging, while Ha Ha Tonka State Park’s karst country, sinkholes, caves, and a large spring, sits close to the kind of roost sites this species uses for both summer shelter and winter hibernation.
October is the strongest month in the record set, with 35, ahead of a late-spring and early-summer plateau. That lines up with fall swarming, when big brown bats gather in large numbers near cave entrances before settling in to hibernate, a behavior that makes them briefly far easier to detect than during the rest of the year. All 243 records come from iNaturalist, 166 of them also carried in GBIF.
Full species profile
