We often hear tawny owls at Century Wood in the evening and overnight, but we’ve never seen proof of them or other owl species until this year. Last month I was walking towards a small isolated shed in the wood in the afternoon when I saw an owl suddenly fly out of its open doorway while I was still 50m away. It flew off between the trees at not much above head height and disappeared. Inside I found four owl pellets which have revealed lots of small mammal bones including skulls.
These are the unopened owl pellets, which look like barn owl pellets to my untrained eye. Owls cough up pellets when their stomachs get too full of bones and hair which they can’t digest. A bit like cats’ fur balls.
I used gloves to pull the pellets apart and then pick the bones out, and fine wood screws and then pins to tease off most of the fluff. I lot of people just dive in with fingers since it’s really just bone and fur stripped by stomach acid and dried owl saliva. These are the bones I saved. There were some even smaller, including vertebrae which felt like bits of grit, which were too small for me to handle easily.
I’ve pick out some of the best examples to have a closer look at, including long bones, jaws with teeth, hip bones with loops, and the long skulls from insectivores like shrews and the wider skulls with big eye sockets from rodents, like mice and voles.
Finally here’s part of a shrew skull with the jaw still in place and long row of teeth visible. For comparison, some preserved common shrews from the Manchester Museum.
