New Hampshire’s occurrence databases hold 65 little brown myotis records, and every one of them falls between April and September. That gap across the colder half of the year traces a hibernating bat’s calendar, not a true absence each winter.
Hunting over Umbagog’s wetlands and White Mountain streams
This bat hunts moths, mosquitoes, and midges low over ponds and slow-moving water, and New Hampshire has plenty of that habitat on offer: the wetland complex around Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge in the North Country, and the streams and beaver ponds threading through White Mountain National Forest. Both places concentrate the flying insects this bat needs to fill its nightly hunt.
Borrowed shelter on granite bedrock
New Hampshire’s granite bedrock offers few of the deep limestone caves this bat once relied on farther south, so its hibernating groups here lean more heavily on old mines, rock crevices, and building spaces that hold a narrow band of cold, stable air through winter. That reliance on a handful of marginal sites is part of why white-nose syndrome, the fungus that has devastated hibernating little brown myotis across the Northeast since the mid-2000s, has hit New Hampshire’s colonies especially hard.
Status in New Hampshire
NatureServe ranks the little brown myotis S1, critically imperiled, in New Hampshire, and even its global rank of G3, vulnerable, reflects how far this once-familiar bat has fallen since white-nose syndrome first appeared. It’s native to the state, one of the clearest examples in New Hampshire’s mammal record of a formerly frequently recorded species pushed to the edge by a single wildlife disease.
Full species profile
