The Mexican long-tongued bat visits Arizona as a seasonal guest rather than a resident, a nectar-feeding bat that hovers at agave stalks and backyard feeders and unspools a tongue nearly a third of its body length to drain a flower. Open databases hold 318 Arizona records, 162 of them iNaturalist photos, a modest tally for one of the few bats that push north out of Mexico each summer to work the borderland blooms.
A bat of the southeastern Sky Islands
Its Arizona records concentrate in the southeast, in Cochise, Santa Cruz, and Pima counties, and they sit surprisingly high. Rather than the saguaro flats most people picture, the species clusters in the oak and pine woodland band partway up the Sky Islands, roosting in caves, old mine tunnels, and rock fissures chosen for warmth and humidity. Saguaro National Park, Coronado National Forest, and the Santa Catalina Mountains all fall along its foraging ground.
Following the bloom, then leaving
This bat’s presence tracks a single moving resource: the flowers it feeds on. It arrives as agaves, saguaros, and organ pipe cactus come into bloom in the warm season, works up the mountains as different plants open, then withdraws to central Mexico by winter once the nectar is gone. A bat that lives on flowers simply cannot stay past them, which is the opposite of the insect-hunting migrants that share its roosts. On every hovering visit its head brushes the anthers, so it does much of the desert’s after-dark pollination for plants that may take a decade to flower even once.
Status in Arizona
The Mexican long-tongued bat is native to Arizona and ranked S2 (imperiled) by NatureServe in the state, one of the more vulnerable ranks among Arizona’s bats. Its fortunes ride on the health of the agave and cactus bloom corridor, so agave harvesting, drought and wildfire killing bloom stalks, and the accidental sealing of maternity roosts are the threats that matter most. A shift of even a few weeks in when the flowers open, under a warming climate, could leave it arriving out of step with its food.
Full species profile
