Chasing Owls

I joined a group that went to a dry river in the High Desert to find and collect owl pellets. If you're not familiar with owl pellets, they are the little bundles of fur that are left over when an owl eats. OK, it sounds kind of gross. But the truth of the matter is that they are no worse than the typical process that happens in nature all the time. Owl finds kangaroo rat, owl eats rat, owl drops pellet.

The dry river was a great spot to gather them because there are plenty of trees that the owls use for their hunting ground, and I learned a trick to collecting the things. When I've done this sort of work before, it mostly involves walking to a tree, circling the tree looking for small lumps in the sand and then moving on to another tree. Hunting started slowly. I walked around for a good hour and came up mostly empty handed.

Our guide called me over to show me a nest. This was a large tree with a hole about 12 feet off the ground. At the base of the tree was a large pile of bones, which was interesting as long as you're not a kangaroo rat. If you ARE a kangaroo rat, then it probably looks like the killing fields. Very gruesome and spooky! But for people, its an interesting sight. It became even more interesting when the resident owl finally got fed up with us tromping around his front porch and took flight from the hole. He (or she) was amazing! Large, boxy and about as impressive as anything I've encountered in the wild. The owl took off and circled us for a bit before alighting on another tree further on. He ticked of a raven in the area which proceeded to 'churk' and make that distinctive sound which is similar to stones rolling around a tin can. So for the rest of the pellet hunt, we knew exactly where the owl was!

At the end of the trip, I'd collected a good sackfull of the gray bundles and was ready to call it a day. Walking through sand is exhausting, and although the morning was cold, the sun was rapidly heating us up. The pellets will make their way into a classroom where students can study them and learn about owls, nature, and the rather traumatic life cycle of the kangaroo rat.