Mammals of Red Slough Wildlife Management Area, with comments on McCurtain County, Oklahoma

Red Slough Wildlife Management Area (RSWMA) is located in the southeastern corner of Oklahoma, McCurtain County, and represents the extreme northwestern extent of the South Central Plains (SCP) ecoregion. Previous mammal research in southeastern Oklahoma has focused mostly on the Ouachita Mountains to the north of RSWMA. As a result, of the 69 species of mammals potentially occurring in McCurtain County, only 48 species represented by 599 voucher specimens reside in natural history collections. We present results from a mammal survey of RSWMA conducted from December 2009 to August 2010. We captured 574 non-volant small mammals in 9,115 trap-nights, 11 bats in 17 net-nights, and seven salvaged meso-mammals resulting in 157 voucher specimens of 22 mammal species, including the first specimen of Castor canadensis for McCurtain County, and photographic vouchers for eight additional species from RSWMA. These results provide a baseline for future studies on RSWMA and substantially increase our natural history knowledge for many relatively under-studied mammals in southeastern Oklahoma