The California myotis is one of Colorado’s smallest and least-seen bats. Open occurrence databases hold 146 records for it in Colorado, and none of them are iNaturalist photos. This is an animal known almost entirely from museum specimens and bat surveys rather than snapshots, so the tally badly undercounts where it actually flies.
A small bat of canyons and water
Weighing about as much as two pennies, the California myotis hunts on quick, fluttering wingbeats low over water, along canyon walls, and through pinyon and juniper. In Colorado it turns up mostly in the warm, low canyon country of the western and southeastern corners, which is why survey records gather in Montezuma, Las Animas, and Moffat counties rather than the high mountains. By day it roosts in rock crevices, under bark, and in buildings, shifting often between sites.
Why the record is so thin
Records climb in summer and disappear in the cold months, but that pattern reflects when biologists run their nets and detectors, not the bat coming and going. Like Colorado’s other myotis it likely spends winter in torpor in sheltered crevices. NatureServe ranks it S3, vulnerable, in the state, a status that owes as much to how hard the animal is to detect as to any measured scarcity.
Common questions
How do people tell one small myotis from another? Rarely by sight in flight. The California myotis is separated from its near-twins mostly in the hand, by its tiny foot, dark facial mask, and skull shape, which is exactly why specimen and survey records dominate its account.
Full species profile
