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New County Records of Oklahoma Mammals Based on Remains Identified in Owl Pellets

2015; Oklahoma Academy of Science; Volume: 86; Linguagem: Inglês

0078-4303

Brandon McDonald,

Species Distribution and Climate Change

Our current understanding of small mam-mal distributions in Oklahoma is based on museum specimens collected sporadically over a period of approximately 100 years (Caire et al 1989). Many museum holdings resulted from trapping surveys, scavenging of road-killed individuals, and owl pellet collections. Although these methods have provided information about what species might be present in an area, species with low abundance, narrow habitat preferences, cyclic population dynamics, or seasonal changes in activity might have been missed in some areas. In addition, some regions of the state have been rarely sampled. The dis-tributions of mammal species occurring in Oklahoma were summarized by Caire et al in 1989. However, gaps in the distributional information available at that time for many species were apparent because some regions of the state had been poorly sampled. Since Caire et al (1989), several studies (Choate 1989; Dalquest 1990; Girard et al 1990; Get-tinger 1991; Clark and Tumilson 1992; Smith 1992, 1996; Stangl and Carr 1997; Stangl et al 1992, 2004; McCaffery et al 2002; Wallace and Stangl 2003; Braun and Revelez 2005) have added new county records of vari-ous species of mammals in Oklahoma and expanded our understanding of the distri-bution of mammals across the state. Braun and Revelez (2005) suggested that there are still incomplete distributional records for several species. In 1999, a large owl pellet collection (over 70,000 pellets) was donated to the University of Central Oklahoma by Paul W. Wilson. It is generally accepted among mammalogists that owls are more effi-cient at capturing some small mammals (e.g., shrews) than researchers using traps (Schowalter et al 2002). Identification of mammalian prey items in this collection of pellets yielded new county records of mam-mals in Oklahoma.