The pocketed free-tailed bat is named for a small pocket of skin folded into its tail membrane, and it hunts fast and high on narrow wings rather than dodging through brush, roosting instead in cliff cracks, mine shafts, and rock crevices. New Mexico sits at the edge of its United States range alongside Arizona, California, and Texas.
New Mexico has no pocketed free-tailed bat records from 2000 to 2026. Older records, most from Hidalgo County in the Bootheel, place it in the state in early summer, but none falls within that window. Bats like this one are hard to detect and identify in flight outside of targeted fieldwork, so the gap may say as much about survey effort as about the bat.
With a state rank of S1, Critically Imperiled, and no recent records, this bat is barely documented in New Mexico at all.
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