Indiana’s eastern small-footed myotis record is really one place and one month. Seventeen of the state’s 18 records come from Wyandotte Caves in Harrison County, and nearly all of them fall in October, when bats gather at cave mouths before settling in to hibernate. That’s not a quirk of the bat; it’s a quirk of counting. Caves concentrate a species that otherwise scatters invisibly across rocky hillsides.
This is Indiana’s rarest bat by weight of evidence. The eastern small-footed myotis is the smallest Myotis in the East, and unlike most of its relatives it often hibernates in cold, drafty spots near cave entrances, or under rocks and in crevices outside caves entirely. That habit makes it easy to miss in standard cave surveys and harder still to find in summer.
NatureServe ranks it Imperiled (S2) in Indiana, and the IUCN assesses the species as Endangered rangewide, driven largely by white-nose syndrome losses. Against that backdrop, the Wyandotte cluster matters. It’s the clearest known foothold in the state, and each October count there doubles as a health check on Indiana’s whole population.
