Indiana has no eastern small-footed myotis records from 2000 to 2026. Older specimen records, all outside that window, come almost entirely from Wyandotte Caves in Harrison County, and nearly all of them were collected 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.
No Indiana bat has a thinner recent record. 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 old Wyandotte cluster matters. It’s the clearest known foothold in the state, and the lack of any record there since 2000 leaves open whether it still holds.
