King Elementary Owl Pellet Study

I had a wonderful time exploring owl ecology and their prey preference with all of you 3^rd grade ornithologists. Here is a review of what we found.

Mrs. Davis’s class dissected 9 pellets and found 22 mice, 1 shrew, 1 mole and 1 bird.

Mrs. Sirico’s class dissected 9 pellets and found 30 mice, 1 shrew, 0 moles and 0 birds.

Mrs. Kipp’s class dissected 8 pellets and found 25 mice, 0 shrews, 0 moles and 1 bird.

The overall results were 77 mice, 2 shrews, 1 mole and 2 birds. This would seem to contradict my hypothesis of shrews being a second favorite food over moles and birds (I always present the favored prey for owls as a hypothesis answering the question of what owl like to eat). Our results say that birds and shrews are equally favored. Remember though, we have a very small sample of 26 pellets. That number of pellets could have been produced by three or four owls in 3 or 4 nights. Do you think it is a good idea to base our decision on this small of a sample?

Look over other owl pellet dissection results here in my blog. Combining the results from other school would serve to increase our sample size and give us better data that we can use to evaluate my hypothesis that mice are the number 1 favored food, with shrews being the second most favored and moles and birds tied for third favored.