New York holds 74 documented tricolored bat records, all logged through GBIF rather than casual sightings, for a bat now critically imperiled in the very state that first flagged the disease behind its decline.
Records peak in July (14 sightings) and August (12), together more than a third of the total, tracking the maternity-colony season for survivors of a population that’s a fraction of its pre-2006 size.
The state where white-nose syndrome began
White-nose syndrome, the fungal disease that has devastated cave-hibernating bats across North America, was first documented in a cave near Albany in the winter of 2006. The tricolored bat, one of the smallest and hardest-hit species, has collapsed across New York and the wider Northeast in the two decades since, which is a large part of why its state records now run so thin.
A loner even inside a crowded cave
Unlike little brown bats, which cluster into dense hibernating masses, tricolored bats tend to hibernate alone or in small scattered groups tucked into cave and mine walls, often mixed in among other species rather than forming their own group. That solitary habit made them harder to census even before white-nose syndrome, and it’s part of why so few turn up in New York’s record today.
Status in New York
NatureServe ranks the tricolored bat S1 in New York, critically imperiled, and it’s native to the state. That’s one of the steepest declines tracked anywhere in the atlas, and it traces straight back to the disease New York’s own caves first revealed to science.
Full species profile
