WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA — Biologists have recorded an endangered gray bat inside a North Carolina state park for the first time, a find the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission announced this month.
The bat turned up in September during the yearly bat survey run jointly by commission biologists and staff from the state parks division. It came from a park in the high country of the western mountains, but officials are not naming the exact spot so the bats are left undisturbed.
State parks inventory and monitoring biologist Ed Corey said the park system holds more than 25 years of bat records and none had ever shown a gray bat in any park unit until now.
Gray bats, known to scientists as Myotis grisescens, went on the federal endangered species list in 1976 and have been scarce in North Carolina for decades. The state sits at the eastern edge of a range centered on the cave country of Tennessee and Kentucky.
For years biologists assumed the few gray bats found here were strays from Tennessee. That changed in 2016, when a bat roost on a bridge over the French Broad River outside Asheville led to the first gray bat roosts ever documented in the state. A search of 71 western bridges that year found six more roosts in Madison and Yancey counties, and the count of known roosts has since grown to about 40 across the French Broad River basin.
White-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that strikes bats during hibernation, has devastated many species. Commission bat biologist Katherine Etchison said infected bats wake so often that they burn through their winter fat and starve before spring.
Corey said gray bats appear to have been hit less hard by the disease than related species and have spread into new foraging areas, and that the species looks stable across its range. The commission said that recovery is strong enough that the gray bat may come off the endangered list in the near future.
