Sauta Cave National Wildlife Refuge

Sauta Cave National Wildlife Refuge, known as Blowing Wind Cave NWR until 1999, lies just above the Sauty Creek embayment of TVA’s Guntersville Reservoir, seven miles west of Scottsboro, Jackson County, Alabama. The refuge established in 1978, under the authority of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to provide protection for the federally endangered gray and Indiana bats and their crucial habitat consisting of 264 acres of hardwood forest. The cave provides a summer roosting site for about 300,000 - 400,000 gray bats and a winter hibernaculum for both bats. There are two entrances into the cave on the Refuge but they are closed to the public. As a result of the unique species within the cave, the Alabama Natural Heritage Program ranks the cave's biodiversity as a site of very high significance. In addition to the rare fauna within the cave, the federally threatened Price's potato-bean occurs on the Refuge.