The pallid bat is one of Arizona’s signature desert bats and turns up across much of the state, from the Sky Island canyons of the southeast to the pinyon country of the north. Open occurrence databases hold 345 Arizona records, 342 of them iNaturalist observations, making it one of the better-documented bats in the state.
A bat that hunts on the ground
The pallid bat breaks the usual bat mold. Instead of catching insects on the wing, it flies low and slow and gleans large prey straight off the ground: scorpions, centipedes, Jerusalem crickets, and beetles, listening for their footsteps with enormous ears. It is famously untroubled by scorpion stings. Pale, blond-furred, and big-eared, it spends the day in rock crevices, cliff faces, and sometimes mines and old buildings.
Where in Arizona to find it
The densest records fall in the rocky south and southeast, in Santa Cruz, Pima, and Cochise counties, where desert scrub, canyon walls, and riparian corridors give the bat both foraging ground and crevice roosts. Petrified Forest National Park leads the named sites, with Tonto National Forest and Madera Canyon in the Santa Rita Mountains behind it, and the species ranges widely, showing up statewide wherever rock and open desert meet.
The winter silence
Records climb through the warm months and drain away in winter, and the reason is physiological. As nights cool and ground prey vanishes, pallid bats enter torpor, retreating deep into rock crevices to wait out the cold rather than travelling far. The near-empty winter months are dormant bats, not departed ones. In Arizona the species is native and ranked S4, apparently secure.
Full species profile
