The pallid bat is a rare and seldom-recorded animal in Colorado. Open occurrence databases hold just 47 records for it here, only 6 of them iNaturalist photographs and the rest older museum and survey records.
A desert bat of two warm corners
The pallid bat is a creature of warm, arid, low country, and in Colorado it holds to two such pockets. One is the southeastern high plains and the Purgatoire canyon country, out toward the Comanche grassland and the Spanish Peaks. The other is the canyon and river valleys of the western Colorado Plateau, in counties like Moffat, Mesa, and Garfield. Both offer what it needs: rock crevices and cliff faces for day roosts, open ground to hunt over, and warm nights. It has no place in the cold high mountains that cover much of the state.
Unlike most bats, it often drops to the ground to take large prey, listening for the footsteps of scorpions, centipedes, Jerusalem crickets, and beetles with a pair of oversized ears.
Why the record goes quiet in winter
The empty cold-season months are not absence in the usual sense. As temperatures fall the pallid bat shifts roosts and drops into torpor, and Colorado sits at the cold northern edge of its range, so activity collapses outside the warm season. The way records bunch into summer tracks when the bats are flying and findable, not a true rise and fall in their numbers.
Native to Colorado and ranked apparently secure by NatureServe, the species nonetheless leans on a handful of warm, low corners of the state and on undisturbed rock and mine roosts, which makes any one colony easy to lose.
Full species profile
