Every one of Missouri’s 153 logged records for this bat comes from GBIF, not one from iNaturalist. That split usually means specimen and survey data, museum records and cave counts, rather than people photographing bats in the wild, which tracks with a species that spends its life in dark roosts and is hard to document casually.
The refuges listed, Mingo, Big Oak Tree, and Swan Lake, sit near river-bottom forest and open water, the kind of habitat this bat favors for foraging over slow water at dusk. Records are sparse and scattered across the year rather than clustered in one season, consistent with a population researchers describe as thin and hard to track rather than one with a clear activity pulse.
NatureServe ranks it S2, Imperiled, in Missouri, well below its G3 global rank. White-nose syndrome, a cold-loving fungus first detected in 2006, has emptied entire hibernating colonies of this species across the country, and Missouri’s own numbers reflect that collapse.
Full species profile
