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, and Brewster County, which holds the park, accounts for 9 of the state’s 10 records.
This is one of the state’s most sparsely recorded bats: just 10 records since 2000, nearly all from GBIF specimen and survey data rather than photographs, and the most recent confirmed record dates back to 2022. Ten records are too few to show a season, and they’re scattered from January through October.
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
