New Mexico’s entire record for the western yellow bat fits in one county: eight reports, all from Hidalgo County in the bootheel, the state’s southwestern corner against Arizona and Mexico. That’s the northern edge of this bat’s range, a species of palms and broadleaf trees in the low deserts, and the bootheel’s streamside strips and mountain foothills are as close to that habitat as New Mexico gets.
Every record falls between May and September, the warm months when an insect-eating tree bat can make a living this far north. Whether any stay through the winter is unknown; the record is too thin to say.
NatureServe ranks the species S1, critically imperiled, in New Mexico, while globally it’s considered secure. That gap is the classic signature of a range-edge population: a handful of records at the fringe of a much larger distribution centered in Mexico and the lower Colorado River country. For now, Hidalgo County is the whole of the bat’s documented New Mexico story.
Full species profile
