Twenty-six of Maryland’s 32 little brown bat records landed in February. That midwinter spike isn’t bat activity; it’s biologists running hibernation counts, slipping into caves and mines to tally the bats hanging inside. Nearly all of those records come from Garrett County, the mountainous western panhandle where Maryland’s cave country is, with a few more from Washington and Frederick counties along the ridge-and-valley belt.
The standing here is as serious as it gets at the state level: NatureServe ranks the little brown bat S1, critically imperiled, in Maryland, and the IUCN lists it as Endangered worldwide. White-nose syndrome, which spreads precisely in those crowded winter hibernation sites, is the reason a once-common bat now draws that kind of attention.
The thin summer record, a handful of reports from August through October, shouldn’t be read as absence. It mostly means Maryland’s surveys have focused where the stakes are highest: the winter caves.
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