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 just 14 records, and 12 of them are iNaturalist photos, a thin trail for a bat this hard to see.
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 scatter from the Sky Islands to the plateau
With so few records there’s no real cluster. Cochise County has the most, with the rest spread one or two apiece from Pima and Santa Cruz counties north to Coconino, Navajo, and Apache on the plateau. That spread traces the bat’s habitat: it needs mountain woodland with rock crevices, caves, or mines for day roosts, terrain the desert basins don’t offer.
Records stop once cold weather sets in
Every dated record falls between May and October. That’s too few to show a finer pattern, but it fits a bat that shifts to sheltered roosts and goes into torpor once the weather turns cold.
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
