Kansas’s occurrence data holds just 46 northern hoary bat records, almost all logged in early summer and again in early fall.
A tree-roosting bat in mostly treeless country
Across central Kansas’s mixed-grass plains and the shortgrass High Plains further west, real tree cover is scarce and comes mostly as river-valley cottonwoods, farmstead windbreaks, and scattered shelterbelts. The hoary bat roosts alone in a tree rather than a cave or building, so it depends on exactly that scattered cover to get through the day, then hunts moths and beetles over open water at wetland complexes like Cheyenne Bottoms and Quivira National Wildlife Refuge after dark.
Two record spikes that trace a migration
Records jump in June, dip through midsummer, then rise again in September before dropping off. That double pulse lines up with the species’ documented coast-to-coast migration: a spring push north that lands the heaviest numbers across the central states by early summer, followed by a southbound return each fall. Kansas sits along that route rather than serving as the species’ settled home ground.
Status in Kansas
NatureServe ranks the Kansas breeding group S4B, Apparently Secure, and the bat is native to the state. Its globally rarer G3 rank reflects wider range-wide pressures, like wind-turbine collisions during migration, rather than anything specific to how it’s faring in Kansas.
Full species profile
