Pocketed free-tailed bats reach only the western edge of Texas, roosting in cliff cracks and mine shafts across desert borderlands shared with Arizona and California. Big Bend National Park fits that range well; Balcones Canyonlands and Big Thicket, both listed for this overlay, sit hundreds of miles east and outside the species’ documented Texas footprint, best read as general reporting locations rather than real habitat.
This is one of the state’s most sparsely recorded bats: just 52 records since 2000, nearly all from GBIF specimen and survey data rather than photographs, and the most recent confirmed record dates back to 2022. What little seasonal signal exists points to July and August, when summer mist-net and acoustic surveys are most active in the desert Southwest.
NatureServe ranks the species Vulnerable (S3) in Texas, and with records this thin and this dated, the pattern likely says less about the bat’s real status at the western edge of its range than about how rarely anyone surveys that stretch of desert borderland.
Full species profile
