The Barn Owl and the Vole ... in the pellet! While walking through the woods in the vicinity of a Barn Owl's nest, I stumbled upon their favorite place to regurgitate pellets. The undigested parts, hair and bones, from a previous meal or two that accumulate in their stomach. And there were so many of them. Struck by curiosity I picked up two. After disinfecting the pellets I spent a few days taking them apart, separating the massive amount of hair from the bones. I thoroughly cleaned the bones and reconstructed the skeleton that seemed to be about 80% complete. As I suspected it was a Meadow Vole. And a big one too. With the second pellet I was not so lucky. Maybe half the number of bones compared to the first one. The bones also belonged to a Vole but of much smaller size. An interesting and fascinating find!
A bit more detail on how all this careful dissection went from start to finish in the blog post
here.
