I send my apologies to the 4th grade ornithologists that I worked with last week at the Leptondale Elementary School in Wallkill. I had told them that I would post this data over the weekend, but I got caught up in a whole bunch of house and yard work (actually trying to repair my garage roof that was damaged by one of the late winter snow storms) and have now just gotten to looking over the data and writing this report.
I visited with Mrs. Psilopoulos’s and Mrs. Dannemann’s classes on Thursday, May 13th and Mr. Zupan’s class on Friday, May 14th. Here are the results of the owl pellet dissections.
Mrs. P’s class – 10 pellets dissected, 33 mice, 1 shrew, 0 moles and 0 birds found
Mrs. D’s class – 13 pellets dissected, 28 mice, 1 shrew, 0 moles and 0 birds found
Mr. Z’s class – 13 pellets dissected, 33 mice, 2 shrew, 0 moles and 1 bird found
There was an unusually high number of mice (the average number of mice per pellet is between 2 to 3) in some of the pellets. In these pellets most of the mice skulls were very small. This is likely the result of the owls finding a mouse nest, and eating all of the baby mice in the nest (actually these are voles, a kind of mouse-like rodent that live in the grass/meadow fields, especially staying in the grass thatch layer close to the ground). The nests would be a hollowed out ball of grass material. The owl upon hearing the baby mouse sounds in the nest would swoop down upon the nest, tear it apart and gobble up all the mice in the nest, eating the babies and perhaps the mom if she was present and did not escape. These pellets had 5 to 7 mice in the pellet with most if not all of them being small skulls from baby mice. A few pellets had 4 or 5 small mouse skulls and 1 large skull. This might have been a situation where the owl ate the mom and all the babies.
Compare these numbers to some of the other owl pellet dissection reported here in my blog.
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