Arkansas’s occurrence databases hold just 3 records of the southeastern myotis, a small bat that roosts in caves and hunts low over water. Most of this species’ range sits along the Gulf Coast and Florida, and Arkansas marks its far northwestern edge.
Cave roosts, wetland dinner table
This bat depends on caves for shelter through much of its range, and Arkansas’s karst country in the Ozark Plateau, riddled with caves along the Buffalo National River and through Ozark and Ouachita National Forests, gives it exactly that. At night it drops low over slow water and wetland edges to hunt aquatic insects, so a roost near the Buffalo’s spring-fed pools puts it within easy reach of both a cave to sleep in and water to feed over.
A northwestern outlier, thinly recorded
Most of the southeastern myotis’s range runs along the Gulf Coast, with Florida’s caves and swamps at its center, and Arkansas sits well outside that stronghold, more disjunct outpost than core range. Its three Arkansas records, two from Desha County and one from Woodruff County, all come from the eastern lowlands rather than the Ozark cave country, and they fall in June and July.
Status in Arkansas
NatureServe ranks the southeastern myotis S3, vulnerable, in Arkansas, and it’s native to the state. A record this sparse, at the far edge of the species’ range and drawn from just two counties, says more about how little of Arkansas fits this bat’s narrow needs than about any decline.
