New Mexico’s occurrence databases hold 284 records for the southwestern myotis, almost all of them GBIF specimen and survey entries rather than public photos. That pattern says more about how this bat gets documented, mostly through netting surveys and museum records, than about how frequently it’s actually encountered.
Roosting in the state’s volcanic cliffs and canyon walls
This bat depends on caves, mines, rock crevices, and old buildings for roosting, and New Mexico has no shortage of that kind of ground. Bandelier National Monument’s volcanic tuff cliffs are honeycombed with natural cavities, the same soft rock ancestral Puebloans once carved into dwellings, and offer exactly the crevice roosts this species favors. Farther southwest, the canyon walls of the Gila National Forest and the Mogollon Mountains provide the same kind of broken, cavity-riddled rock.
A spring-to-fall flier that disappears each winter
Records here run from April through October and peak in June, then drop to nothing from November through March. That gap lines up with how the species handles cold weather elsewhere in its range, becoming far less active or slipping into torpor once temperatures drop, so the empty winter months reflect the bat’s own biology rather than a break in reporting. Through the warm months it forages at night over canyon streams and woodland clearings in the state’s oak and pinyon-juniper country, hunting moths and other flying insects on the wing.
Status in New Mexico
NatureServe ranks the southwestern myotis S4, apparently secure, in New Mexico, where it’s native to its mountain range. Its future here rests less on raw numbers than on keeping natural roost sites, cave entrances, tuff crevices, and old mine openings intact across the Gila and Bandelier country it depends on.
Full species profile
