The western small-footed myotis is a bat of rock: canyon walls, cliff faces, talus, and lava country. Idaho’s 34 records fit that identity. Bannock County in the southeast accounts for 23 of them, and named sites include Craters of the Moon National Monument, where basalt flows and crevices make ideal roosting ground.
February is the heaviest month in the record, a sure sign of winter cave and mine surveys rather than bat activity. The rest scatter from May through December, which suits a species known to hibernate locally in the same rocky country it uses all summer.
NatureServe ranks the bat S3, vulnerable, in Idaho, though globally it’s considered secure. That gap is typical for a species at the edge of dense survey coverage: the record is thin because the habitat is remote and the bat is small and quiet on the wing, not necessarily because it’s rare. Every new crevice survey in the Snake River plain’s lava country tends to add a few more records.
Full species profile
