Montana’s occurrence databases hold 81 records of the long-eared myotis, a modest count that mostly tracks how hard this small, crevice-roosting bat is to find, not how widely it ranges across the state’s mountains.
Rock and rugged high country, not open valleys
This bat follows Montana’s broken, rocky terrain rather than its open valley floors: the rimrock and forest edges around Glacier National Park, the rugged subalpine slopes of the Absaroka-Beartooth country, and the mixed conifer and canyon terrain across Custer-Gallatin National Forest all offer exactly what it needs, narrow cracks in cliff faces, loose bark on standing dead trees, and old mine openings. A long-eared myotis wedges into spaces only a few centimeters wide, so its Montana range tracks fractured rock and dead wood more closely than it tracks any single vegetation type.
A short mountain summer sets the whole calendar
Records jump from May through August and vanish the rest of the year. That’s not migration; it’s Montana’s compressed high-elevation summer dictating when insects fly and when this bat leaves its winter hideout at all. In the state’s high country, warm nights with enough flying insects to hunt only last so long, and the small maternity colonies this bat forms to raise a single pup each summer have to pack breeding, feeding, and fattening into that same narrow window before hibernation season returns.
Status in Montana
The long-eared myotis is native across its Montana range, and NatureServe ranks it S3, vulnerable. Because it depends on specific, hard-to-replace shelter, standing dead trees, loose bark, and open rock crevices, in Montana’s high country, losing those small features one roost at a time is a bigger threat to it here than any single broad pressure.
Full species profile
