Wising up on owls

I've been trying to get a good Barn Owl photo to illustrate this post. As I didn't succeed I decided to make my own picture.

The Barn Owl is probably my favourite bird. I hardly ever saw one when I lived in Cheshire, now on my morning patch walks, I see them very regularly.  I get a thrill every time.

There’s something very enigmatic about them - somehow they don’t seem to belong to quite the same dimension as everything else.

Almost as if they’ve slipped through a portal - briefly joining our world from their ghostly homeland  - then returning there at the end of the night.

A hunting Barn Owl is a beautiful thing to watch - the slow motion dance of wheeling, flitting and pouncing - all with a wonderful buoyancy - a  lightness of touch. I think the word 'grace' was invented for this.

I collected some owl pellets from underneath a roosting place  which I've been dissecting like a good’un, like an owl-based Gillian Mckeith in fact - only with pellets rather than poop.

Barn Owl pellet

Mammal teeth
Common Shrew, Bank Vole, Field Vole

Pellet dissection isn't the unpleasant -  rummaging around in remains - you might imagine. The pellets are dry and almost odourless. However in my wisdom (which is decidedly finite) I sterilised, them with a quick blast in the microwave. This left a smell in the kitchen, that scholars of the future will probably refer to as - 'very nasty'.

The things to look out for are the lower jaw bones - each pair represents one mammal.

Those results in full:

Right lower Jaws from 8 Barn Owl pellets.  As expected Field voles are the commonest prey item - around 50% of a British Barn Owl's diet consists of Field Voles, followed by Common Shew 20%, Wood mouse 15%.  

These pellets were collected at the beginning of February and were probably produced during a period of weather which wasn't conducive to good hunting - i.e very wet and windy. 

Typically a Barn Owl will produce three or four pellets a night and will catch something in the region of 2,000 small mammals during a year.

Owl pellets are another example of something that gives us a glimpse of a world we hardly ever see. There are throngs of small mammals scurrying around in the undergrowth. In fact, as much of the patch consists of rough grassland - prime vole habitat - there could be a patch population of 20,000!

Compare this with Wrens - the patch commonest bird with about 50 breeding pairs - I very frequently see Wrens whereas I hardly ever see a vole.

Wrens inhabit a similar "sense world" to ours - voles are almost invisible to us - their's is  a different domain. With their super-keen senses owls straddle both domains - they have to in order to survive.

Bank Vole - upper jaw - rounded lobes on the teeth - second molar (i.e the middle tooth) has 5 lobes

Field Vole - upper jaw - pointed lobes on the teeth - second molar (i.e the middle tooth) has 6 lobes

Barn Owl pellets:

• are easy to recognise, being black and shiny often with a pointed end
• consist of bones within a matrix softer material - usually fur
• are formed when prey is swallowed whole - the food is broken up in the gizzard the indigestible parts are compacted into the pellet, the rest passes on to the stomach for digestion

Dissecting pellets gives us a lot of useful information:

• what the owl eats
• how much it eats
• what small mammals are present in the area and in what numbers

Recent Patch Sightings
18/2 - first Blackbird song (one of my  highlights every year)
19/2 - Chaffinch, Goldcrest, Treecreeper, Mistle Thrush Song
20/2 - Canada Geese back at the lake - the first 'summer visitors'

Me and my shadow enjoying some morning sun and frost on the patch

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