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.
All 10 of the state’s confirmed records fall in June and July, eight of them in June alone, with nothing recorded in any other month. That’s an unusually tight cluster for a bat, and it likely reflects when acoustic surveys or roost checks happen rather than when the species is actually present, since bats are hard to detect and identify in flight outside of targeted fieldwork.
With a state rank of S1, Critically Imperiled, and only 10 records total, this bat is barely documented in New Mexico at all.
Full species profile
