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Western Grebe in Oklahoma

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Western Grebe in Oklahoma.-The Western Grebe (Aechntophorus occidentalis) may migrate regularly through Oklahoma, but it can hardly do so in great numbers for records of any SOI? are so few. Margaret M. Nice, in the revised edition of her “The Birds of Oklahoma” (1931), does not even mention the species. Orrin W. Letson of Tulsa, Oklahoma, informs me that a Western Grebe was seen repeatedly on Recreation Lake, in Mohawk Park, Tulsa, Tulsa County, by several members of the TuBa Audubon Society on October 30, October 31, and November 1, 1951, and this observation was reported briefly by Baumgartner (Audubon Field-notes, 6, 1952 : 25).

On January 3, 1954, along the shore of this same lake, Anne (Mrs. Bruce) Reynolds, one of the persons who had observed the species there in 1951, found a Western Grebe dead. The specimen, frozen solid, reached me in excellent condition a day or so later. I skinned it promptly, finding it to be not at all fat (weight, 857 grams). Its stomach was packed with grebe feathers, presumably its own. It was a female, probably an adult. In the neck I found a small shot-wound-hardly severe enough, I should think, to have caused death directly. The specimen, apparently the first for Oklahoma, is now in the bird collection of the University of Oklahoma,GEORGE MIKSCH SUTTON, Deportment of Zoology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, January 26, 1954.

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