LANSING, Mich. — One of Michigan’s hardest-hit bats may be turning a corner. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources says its latest winter count found little brown bat numbers holding steady and starting to inch up at several Upper Peninsula hibernation sites, years after a fungal disease wiped out much of the population.
In its 2026 bat monitoring report, the DNR said staff ran 36 surveys during the 2025-26 winter at 24 different sites across Baraga, Dickinson, Houghton, Keweenaw and Ontonagon counties. Crews tallied more than 13,000 bats in all, and little brown bats made up more than 12,000 of them. Surveyors also logged 902 big brown bats and 12 tricolored bats.
The news was grim for the northern long-eared bat. Crews found a single one, at one site, and the DNR said the species keeps sliding. Federal wildlife officials moved it from threatened to endangered in late 2022, saying hibernation counts across its range have dropped 97 to 100%.
The main culprit is white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that strikes bats while they hibernate and was first spotted in New York in 2006. In Michigan, four of the state’s nine bat species spend October through May in old copper and iron mines in the Upper Peninsula, which lets biologists count them year after year.
Bats save farmers and foresters money by eating huge amounts of insects that damage crops and trees. The DNR’s volunteer roost program, now finishing its first full season, logged 139 summer roosts, nearly all of them in the Lower Peninsula, and the agency is seeking more volunteers statewide.
