The fringed myotis is a mid-sized bat that reaches into Arizona’s mountain woodlands and stays almost entirely out of sight. State databases hold 494 records, but only 12 come from iNaturalist photos; the rest are museum specimens and bat-detector or survey captures, the record of an animal biologists document far more often than casual observers do.
A fringe built for picking insects off foliage
The bat’s name comes from a row of stiff hairs along the trailing edge of its tail membrane, a feature visible only in the hand. That fringe helps it glean beetles and other hard-bodied insects directly off leaves and the ground rather than just catching them in open flight, a hunting style suited to Arizona’s pine-oak and pinyon-juniper woodland rather than open desert air.
Records cluster in the Sky Islands and the Coconino highlands
Cochise and Santa Cruz counties, the Sky Island ranges of the southeast, carry the largest share of Arizona records, with a second cluster in the higher country of Coconino County. That split traces the bat’s habitat directly: it needs mountain woodland with rock crevices, caves, or mines for day roosts, terrain the desert basins between those two regions don’t offer.
Captures fall off once cold weather sets in
Records pile up across the summer months and drop away by late autumn, the pattern of a bat that shifts to sheltered roosts and goes into torpor once the weather turns cold. There’s no separate autumn spike here, unlike some of Arizona’s other mammals; once the bat stops flying for the season, the surveys that generate most of its records stop too.
Status in Arizona
Fringed myotis is native to Arizona, and NatureServe ranks it S3, vulnerable, in the state. That rank reflects real sensitivity to roost disturbance in the caves, mines, and rock crevices it depends on, compounded by how hard a scarce, forest-dwelling bat is to survey in the first place.
Full species profile
