North Carolina’s eastern small-footed myotis records belong almost entirely to the Blue Ridge, near Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where cool, high-elevation streams and exposed rock outcrops give this small bat the roosting crevices and clean water it needs. It isn’t a Piedmont or Coastal Plain animal here; the handful of records track the mountains specifically.
It’s one of the smallest bats in the eastern United States, and it roosts in tight rock crevices and beneath talus rather than in the open cave chambers other myotis species use. That habit, combined with how few of them there seem to be, makes it one of the hardest bats in the state to document even with focused survey effort.
Records run from June through October, with the state’s few reports clustering in summer and early fall when survey activity and bat movement both increase. Given how sparse the total record is, a missing month says far more about how little this bat has been surveyed than about where it actually flies.
