A hundred and one New York records document the northern long-eared bat, the great majority pulled from GBIF specimen and survey data built around hibernaculum counts rather than casual sightings. Records like these follow the survey, not the bat, since this species spends most of its life out of easy view.
Summer canopy, winter mine tunnel
New York’s northern hardwood and mixed forests, the kind that blanket much of the Adirondacks and Catskills, give the bat its summer range: it roosts by day under loose bark and hunts insects in gaps beneath the canopy at night. When the weather turns it abandons the trees for caves and old mine tunnels underground, so its New York story really has two separate settings depending on the season.
A sharp August spike, then a slow fade
The state’s monthly counts sit low through spring, climb hard in August, and stay up into October before tapering off toward winter. That shape matches the fall swarming these bats do around hibernaculum entrances ahead of settling in, and some of New York’s oldest hibernacula are old mine workings in the Hudson Valley and Shawangunks, a likely reason the records bunch up in early fall rather than July.
Status in New York
NatureServe ranks the species S1, critically imperiled, and lists it as native to New York rather than introduced. The state also has an outsized place in the species’ history: white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that drove the collapse, turned up first in a cave near Albany in the winter of 2006, years before it reached most of the bat’s range.
Full species profile
