Fringed myotis roosts in caves, mines, and rock crevices by day and forages over desert scrub and woodland by night, which fits why Pinnacles National Park, with its talus caves and rock crevices, leads the state’s places with 5 records. The rest scatter thinly across 14 counties, from Riverside and San Diego north to Plumas and Del Norte.
California has 27 records in all, 15 from iNaturalist and 20 carried by GBIF with some overlap between the two, a small set for a nocturnal bat most people never see up close.
August is the high point in the monthly count with 7 records, followed by September, with a smaller rise in April. With so few records, that late-summer shape most likely tracks when field crews run acoustic and capture surveys, not when the bats are truly most active.
California ranks the species S3, vulnerable at the state level, a status that carries more weight given how thinly the bat is documented here.
Full species profile
