Tennessee’s 1,083 records of the gray bat make it one of the more heavily documented bats in the state, and the great majority, 1,064, come through GBIF rather than iNaturalist, a pattern more typical of formal cave surveys than casual sightings.
A cave specialist with a Tennessee stronghold
This bat moves between a small number of suitable caves year-round and flies out at night to hunt insects over rivers and reservoirs. Tennessee’s limestone cave country along the Highland Rim and the Cumberland Plateau escarpment holds some of the largest known gray bat hibernation and maternity caves anywhere in the species’ range, a big part of why an imperiled bat still carries this many records in the state.
A June spike that’s really a nursery count
Reports jump sharply in June, to 209 records, the highest month by far. That timing matches maternity season, when females gather by the thousands into a handful of nursery caves, an easy moment for biologists to count a colony in one visit, not a summer jump in the bat’s real numbers.
Status in Tennessee
NatureServe ranks the gray bat S2, Imperiled, globally G3, and lists it as native to Tennessee. USGS NAS doesn’t list it as nonindigenous in the state.
