The California myotis is one of the West’s smallest bats, and Idaho has no records of it from 2000 to 2026. It favors dry, rocky country with water nearby: canyon rims, ponderosa edges, cliffs above rivers.
A bat this small, high-flying and quiet-voiced, almost never gets noticed casually; nearly every record of one comes from a mist net, an acoustic detector, or a captured animal. That makes an empty recent record hard to read, since it can reflect how little survey work has reached the species as much as genuine scarcity.
NatureServe ranks it vulnerable in Idaho, though it’s secure across its full range. The Snake River canyon country and the forest breaks of the central mountains remain the likeliest ground. Any new record would help show where in Idaho the species still holds on.
Full species profile
