South Dakota’s northern myotis is a Black Hills story. Pennington and Custer counties supply nearly nine of every ten mapped reports, with sites like Sand Creek and the edge of the Badlands adding a handful more. The Hills hold the state’s only large expanse of mature forest, and this is a bat of deep woods, raising its young under loose bark and hibernating in caves and mines. Whether it’s truly scarce out on the prairie or just unlooked-for is harder to say, because records trace survey effort as much as range.
The calendar is sharp. Reports pile up in July, when maternity colonies are busy and pups begin to fly, and vanish from late fall through spring while the bats hibernate out of sight.
NatureServe ranks the bat S2, imperiled in South Dakota, against a G2 worldwide and a Near Threatened listing from the IUCN. For a species in trouble across the continent, the pine forests and cave country of the Black Hills are South Dakota’s piece of the answer.
Full species profile
