The western small-footed myotis is a member of Colorado’s bat fauna. Databases hold 266 Colorado records, of which just 11 are iNaturalist photos. It is among the hardest of the state’s bats to document, a tiny animal that roosts deep in stone and flies late into the dark.
Rock is the habitat
Where the little brown bat is a water-and-buildings generalist, this one is a crevice specialist of dry, broken country. It wedges into narrow cracks in cliffs, boulder piles, road cuts, and the eroded clay of badlands, and it forages close to those rock faces over sparse shrubland. Colorado records reflect that preference: the canyon and mesa country of the southwest around Montezuma County, the arid northwest around Moffat County, and the rimrock edges of the San Luis Valley, all places where sun-warmed rock stands above open desert scrub.
A late riser that stays put
Its records build through the warm months and thin toward winter, but this bat does not travel far. It is one of the most cold-tolerant Myotis in the West, hibernating in the same kind of rock crevices and small caves it hunts near rather than migrating to a distant cave system. So the seasonal curve is less about departure than about torpor: the animal simply stops flying, tucked into stone, and reappears when spring insects return.
Status in Colorado
NatureServe ranks it apparently secure in the state, and the IUCN lists it as Least Concern globally. Its reliance on scattered rock roosts rather than large communal hibernacula may, for now, spare it the worst of the white-nose outbreaks that threaten its more cave-dependent relatives.
Full species profile
