North Carolina’s hoary bat records point toward the Piedmont, the rolling hardwood and pine forest and river corridors around the Uwharrie National Forest and nearby game lands. That fits a species that roosts alone in trees rather than packing into caves, since it just needs a single suitable branch or bark fold rather than the cave systems the state’s mountain bats depend on.
It’s among the largest bats in North America, wrapped in dense frosted fur that reads as silvery gray from a distance, and it hunts moths and beetles on the wing across open sky rather than gleaning insects close to foliage. That combination of solitary tree roosting and long-distance flight makes it a species people rarely notice even where it’s present.
Records here are thin and cluster in winter and again in the fall, which fits a migratory bat passing through the Piedmont rather than settling in for the whole year. The sparse count likely says as much about how hard a lone tree-roosting bat is to find as it does about how often it actually visits the state.
Full species profile
