The Bat North Carolina Stopped Expecting to Find, Caught at Last in a Nantahala Mist Net

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 21, 2026

Five bats hit a mist net strung across a gap in the Nantahala National Forest this summer, and the biologists who worked them loose realized within a minute that they were holding a species North Carolina had not confirmed in a net in more than a decade.

All five were Indiana bats. All five were reproductive females, which meant they were not lone wanderers passing through. It meant there was a colony somewhere close, raising pups, in a forest most people assumed the disease had emptied.

The Species Nobody Expected to Catch

The Indiana bat has been on the federal endangered species list since 1967, longer than the Endangered Species Act itself has existed in its current form. It is a small, unremarkable-looking brown bat, close enough in appearance to a little brown bat that telling them apart usually requires having one in your hand, under good light, with someone who knows what they are looking at.

North Carolina had not captured one during mist netting surveys since 2015. Eleven summers of nets, in a state where bat crews work through the warm months across the mountain counties, and nothing.

The survey that found them was not looking for Indiana bats specifically. Crews from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, the U.S. Forest Service and Brown Environmental had been working Graham County looking for survivors of white-nose syndrome in general.

"We had recently captured little brown bats, another WNS-susceptible species, in the area and expanded our survey effort in the hopes of catching more little brown bats and possibly other WNS-survivor species," said Katherine Etchison, a bat biologist with the Wildlife Commission.

That is how a lot of field discoveries happen. You go looking for one thing, you widen the search because the first thing turned up, and you find something you had quietly stopped expecting. Mist netting is slow, unglamorous work, done in the dark, in humid mountain air, standing in one spot for hours waiting for a net to twitch.

The nets are fine mesh, nearly invisible to a bat's echolocation when crews set them well, and crews check them constantly so nothing stays tangled long. Crews measure, identify, age and check each bat for reproductive condition, then release it. Most nights produce a handful of common species and nothing worth a press release.

This night produced five bats that changed what biologists thought they knew about the state's population.

Following the Signal to a Dead Hemlock

Catching the bats was the first half. Finding out where they lived was the point.

Biologists fitted two of the five with radio transmitters, small enough to glue between the shoulder blades and light enough not to interfere with flight. The transmitters fall off on their own within a couple of weeks. Until then, they let a person with an antenna and a receiver walk a ridge in the dark and follow a beeping signal to a tree.

The signal led to the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness Area, and to a dead Eastern hemlock. The roost was not a hollow or a cavity. It was the space beneath the loose, peeling bark of a standing dead tree, a gap maybe an inch deep that the sun warms through the afternoon and the bark keeps dry.

That is a maternity roost. Female Indiana bats gather in these pockets in summer to give birth and raise a single pup each, packed tight together for warmth while the males roost alone somewhere else entirely.

At sunset, biologists sat below the tree and counted bats coming out. Twenty-four.

"This was a big find for us," Etchison said. "So, we're thinking ahead to the steps we can take to learn more about this Indiana bat colony."

The tree itself is worth a closer look. The hemlock was dead, almost certainly a victim of hemlock woolly adelgid, the insect that has taken down hemlock stands across these mountains over the past twenty-five years. Anyone who has hiked the Davidson River corridor or the coves above Cullowhee has walked past the gray remains of them.

One ecological disaster produced the standing dead wood that a colony surviving a second ecological disaster now uses to raise its young. That is not a tidy story. It is how these mountains actually work.

Transylvania County Was Where This Started

The Nantahala find is Graham County news, but the disease behind it first turned up in North Carolina in Transylvania County.

In 2011, the first year the state confirmed white-nose syndrome anywhere inside its borders, one of those cases came from a bat in Transylvania County, found near the Wildlife Commission's Pisgah Center for Wildlife Education in Pisgah Forest. Fifteen years later, families still pull off U.S. 276 to walk through the hatchery there and let the kids look at trout.

That proximity says something about how quickly this moved. The disease did not creep in along some remote back ridge. It showed up next to one of the most-visited wildlife education sites in the region, in a county where the forest starts at the edge of town.

Transylvania County has close to 300 waterfalls and a large share of Pisgah National Forest inside its lines, and the same forest structure that draws hikers to Looking Glass and DuPont makes it good bat country. Water for drinking and insect hatches, old timber with cavities and shedding bark, and cool north-facing coves for summer roosting.

The Wildlife Commission has documented white-nose syndrome across seven North Carolina species, and the mountain counties took the hardest losses because that is where the hibernation sites are. Bats from Brevard, Sylva, Franklin and Andrews all funnel toward the same limited set of caves and abandoned mines for winter, which is exactly what makes a contact-spread fungus so efficient.

So while nobody netted an Indiana bat in Transylvania this summer, the discovery two counties west matters to anyone here who has noticed fewer bats working the yard at dusk than they remember from a decade ago.

The Numbers Behind the Silence

A cold-loving fungus causes white-nose syndrome, growing on the muzzle and wing membranes of hibernating bats. The visible white fuzz is what named it, but the fuzz is not what kills.

The fungus irritates the bat awake. A hibernating bat runs on a fat budget calculated to the gram for a winter of near-total stillness, and every unplanned arousal spends weeks of that budget in an afternoon. Bats wake, burn fuel, sometimes fly out into January looking for insects that do not exist, and die of starvation before spring.

Nationwide, the estimate is 6.7 million bats killed since researchers identified the disease in 2006. In North Carolina, the Wildlife Commission's own figures run like this: little brown and northern long-eared bats down about 93 percent, tricolored bats down 83 percent, Indiana bats down 73 percent.

A 93 percent decline is difficult to picture until you translate it. A hibernaculum that held a thousand bats holds seventy. A cave that held ten thousand holds seven hundred, spread thin across the same cold rock.

That collapse is why an eleven-year gap in Indiana bat captures did not read to biologists as bad luck. It read as a real possibility that breeding colonies had disappeared here. Five reproductive females and a roost tree with 24 bats in it does not undo any of those percentages, but it answers a question that had been sitting open.

The colony exists. It is reproducing. It made it through the worst of it.

Why Survivor Colonies Matter More Than the Count

The value of these 24 bats is not primarily the 24 bats.

When a disease removes 90-plus percent of a population, the remainder is not a random sample. Something about the survivors is different. It might be genetics, some variation in immune response or in how deeply and how long they hibernate. It might be behavioral, a preference for roosts and hibernation sites with the wrong temperature or humidity profile for the fungus. It might be microbial, a difference in the bacteria living on their skin.

Researchers across the eastern United States are working all three angles, and every confirmed survivor colony is a data point no lab can manufacture. Finding one in the southern Appalachians matters especially, because this is the warm edge of the Indiana bat's range and the conditions here differ from the Midwest caves where researchers have done most of the work on the species.

The Wildlife Commission has said it is planning follow-up monitoring and further research on the Nantahala colony. In practice that usually means returning to count emergences at the roost, netting the same area in future seasons, and possibly collecting genetic samples to compare against pre-decline reference material.

There is also a habitat lesson here. The colony chose loose bark on a standing dead tree in a designated wilderness area, meaning no salvage logging, no hazard-tree removal, no tidying up. Snags stay standing until they fall.

That is a management argument that applies well beyond Graham County, including for private landowners across Jackson, Macon and Transylvania counties deciding what to do with dead trees on their acreage.

What a Bat Colony Is Worth Around Here

There is a practical argument for bats that tends to land with people who are not otherwise moved by wildlife listings.

A single insect-eating bat can take thousands of night-flying insects in one night. Multiply across a colony and across a summer and the number climbs past anything a homeowner is going to duplicate with a bug zapper. Nationally, agricultural economists have put the pest-control value of bats in the billions of dollars annually in avoided crop losses and reduced insecticide use.

In these counties that shows up in specific ways. Corn earworm moths and cucumber beetles in Haywood County bottomland. Codling moths in Henderson County apple orchards. Mosquitoes over every pond and slow creek between here and the Tennessee line.

It shows up in quality-of-life terms too. Anyone who has eaten dinner on a porch in Franklin or Highlands in July has had bats working for them without noticing, watching them cut erratic loops over the yard at dusk while nobody at the table gets bitten.

Losing 90 percent of that service does not announce itself. It arrives as a summer where the gnats seem worse, where the garden takes more spraying, where the porch is less pleasant after nine o'clock and nobody can quite say why.

That is the practical argument for caring how the Nantahala colony does over the next few years. A lot of life here happens outdoors in the evening, and part of what makes those evenings work is a population of animals almost nobody sees.

What You Can Actually Do

Most of the useful actions are small and require no expertise.

Stay out of closed caves and abandoned mines, which land managers in this region gate for good reason. Human traffic wakes hibernating bats during the exact months they cannot afford it, and boots and rope carry fungal spores between sites. If you cave legally and with permits, decontaminate gear thoroughly between trips.

Leave standing dead trees where they are not a safety hazard. A snag with loose bark on the back edge of a property is potential roost habitat, and the Nantahala find shows what that structure is worth. If you must take a tree down, doing it in winter avoids the maternity season when flightless pups are in the bark.

Reconsider blanket insecticide fogging in summer. It removes the food supply and can move toxins up the chain.

Bat houses work when you put them up right, which means on a pole or a building, not a tree, with good sun exposure and adequate height. A poorly sited box stays empty for years.

The Wildlife Commission also runs the N.C. Bat Acoustic Monitoring Program, which sends volunteers driving fixed routes through mountain counties with roof-mounted ultrasonic detectors. It is real data collection, done by ordinary residents, and the mountain routes regularly need drivers.

The Nantahala colony survived a disease that took nine out of ten of its neighbors, and it did it in a wilderness area where nobody touched the standing dead trees. That kind of country, forest left to be forest, is a large part of why people end up here in the first place, and if you ever find yourself wondering what it takes to put down roots in a place like this, I'm always happy to talk it through over coffee.

Sources: WRAL, WLOS, NC Wildlife Resources Commission, NC Wildlife Federation

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What kind of endangered bat was found in North Carolina?

The Indiana bat, a small brown bat that has been listed as federally endangered since 1967. Biologists with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, the U.S. Forest Service and Brown Environmental captured five reproductive females during mist net surveys in the Nantahala National Forest in Graham County. It was the first time Indiana bats had been caught during mist netting surveys anywhere in North Carolina since 2015. The species is easy to confuse with the little brown bat in the field, which is part of why in-hand capture matters so much. Indiana bats can live around 14 years and eat enormous quantities of night-flying insects.

Where exactly were the Indiana bats found?

The captures happened in the Nantahala National Forest in Graham County, in far western North Carolina. Two of the five bats were fitted with tiny radio transmitters, and biologists followed the signals to a maternity roost tucked beneath the loose bark of a dead Eastern hemlock inside the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness Area. At sunset, researchers counted 24 bats leaving that single tree. Wildlife agencies typically keep precise roost coordinates private to protect the colony from disturbance, and the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness is remote country with limited trail access, so casual visitors are unlikely to stumble onto the site.

What is white-nose syndrome and how bad is it in Western North Carolina?

White-nose syndrome is a fungal disease that grows on hibernating bats, rousing them repeatedly through winter until they burn through the fat reserves meant to carry them to spring. It reached North Carolina in 2011, when the first confirmed case in the state came from a bat in Transylvania County near the Pisgah Center for Wildlife Education. Nationwide the disease has killed an estimated 6.7 million bats since 2006. In North Carolina, seven species are affected, with little brown and northern long-eared bats down roughly 93 percent, tricolored bats 83 percent, and Indiana bats 73 percent.

Can people help protect bats in Western North Carolina?

Yes, and most of it is simple. Stay out of closed caves and abandoned mines, since human traffic both disturbs hibernating colonies and moves fungal spores between sites, and decontaminate boots and gear if you do any permitted caving. Leave standing dead trees on your property when they are not a hazard, because loose bark on snags is exactly the roost structure the Nantahala colony chose. Skip broad-spectrum insecticide fogging in summer. The Wildlife Commission also runs a volunteer acoustic monitoring program that uses car-mounted detectors along mountain routes, and volunteers are regularly needed.