North Carolina sits at the edge of this bat’s range, and records are thin statewide. The handful near William B. Umstead State Park, Jordan Lake, and Falls Lake sit in Piedmont river-bottom forest, the kind of loose-barked hardwoods along water that Indiana bats use for summer roosting and foraging. The species’ actual winter hibernacula, the limestone caves and old mines it depends on for hibernation, lie farther west in North Carolina’s mountains, not near these Piedmont lakes.
Indiana bats split their year between two very different homes. In summer, females roost in groups under peeling bark on dead or dying trees near water, and the whole population forages over rivers, lakes, and forest edges for moths, beetles, and mosquitoes. In winter, they cluster by the thousands in a small number of caves, which is exactly what makes disturbance or disease at one cave site so damaging to the wider population.
North Carolina’s records are too sparse to show a clear seasonal pattern, and the species’ near-total dependence on a few mountain hibernation caves means most of the population is never near the Piedmont sites where summer records happen to cluster.
Full species profile
