Utah’s 69 big brown bat records connect the Wasatch Front and the Uintah Basin, where Salt Lake, Utah, and Uintah counties lead the count, with Grand Staircase-Escalante’s cliffs and canyons farther south. The species is a powerful beetle hunter whose broad jaws can crush hard insect cases, and its willingness to roost in buildings, bridges, caves, and tree cavities puts it in more human settings than many western bats.
July leads the 69-record calendar, when maternity colonies are active and warm nights support plenty of flying insects. Detector coverage and access shape that peak, so it is not a count of bats. In winter, big brown bats retreat to cool protected hibernation sites, making the warm-season record bias biologically plausible without proving statewide abundance.
Its S4 (apparently secure) Utah rank fits a bat that tolerates buildings and bridges as readily as caves, one of the few species here whose comfort around human structures works in its favor.
Full species profile
