The tricolored bat is one of the smallest bats in the East, and Connecticut’s records for it are few and telling. Ten of the state’s 17 reports come from New London County, with the coastal preserves around Hammonasset Beach, Barn Island, and Bluff Point anchoring that cluster. A handful more come from Litchfield County in the northwest hills.
August is the heaviest month in the record, which fits the bat’s summer activity, but the small January and November entries matter too: they hint at winter hibernation sites that surveyors happened to check. With so few reports, the pattern says more about where biologists have looked than about where the bats actually roost.
NatureServe ranks the tricolored bat S1, critically imperiled, in Connecticut, and the IUCN lists it as Vulnerable globally. White-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that has devastated cave-hibernating bats across the East, is the main driver, and a species already thin on the ground has little margin left.
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