Maine is about as far northeast as the tricolored bat gets, and the state’s record for it is thin: a dozen reports, ten of them from Kennebec County. The scattered remainder comes from Cumberland and Knox counties along the coast. Places like Acadia National Park and the Rachel Carson and Petit Manan refuges hold the forested, water-adjacent country the bat favors, but a dozen records can’t map a population. They mark where someone was listening or netting.
Every Maine report falls between June and September, the season when the bats are active and when researchers run acoustic surveys and mist nets. Winter records are absent, so where these bats spend the cold months in Maine remains an open question.
That uncertainty is built into the official standing: NatureServe marks the species SU, unrankable, in Maine, meaning there isn’t enough information to assign a conservation rank at all. Globally the picture is grimmer. The IUCN lists the tricolored bat as Vulnerable, and white-nose syndrome has cut hard into its numbers across the East.
Full species profile
