Eastern red bats don’t roost in caves or buildings like many Ohio bats. They hang alone in tree foliage, tucked among leaves where their reddish fur and furred tail membrane make them look like a curled, dead leaf. Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge and Killdeer Plains Wildlife Area sit inside its Ohio range, with 359 records logged there and elsewhere since 2000, though a report says more about where people were looking up than where the bat is most common.
Records climb through spring, peak in July, and fall off by winter, a pattern that fits a bat that migrates south rather than hibernating through an Ohio winter like the state’s cave bats do. Ohio hasn’t assigned it a numeric conservation rank (NatureServe lists it SNR, unranked), so its real status here is harder to pin down than for the state’s more closely tracked bat species.
Full species profile
