It’s Caturday, which on my blog I’ve expanded to anything I feel like in the animal kingdom. Last week it was owls, and this is a followup.
I talked about the Great Horned Owl babies we saw in a tree stump along a creek near our house. Well, after school this week The Little Astronomer and I biked over to check them out, and one of them was out of the nest! It was on a branch with one of the parents, and they were sharing a meal. I suppose the Elder Owl was teaching its young paduwan how to eat. I’m not sure, but from 20 meters away I definitely saw something nasty hanging out of the youngling’s beak. Bigger than a mouse, so maybe a rat or some other smallish rodent.
The other, smaller baby was still in the nest. Sometimes, the smaller, weaker chick is killed by its bigger sibling, but this one looks healthy enough, just a bit smaller. I expect it’ll be out of the nest next time we check on it.
I’ve noticed that one of the parent owls sometimes likes to sit on one particular branch of a tree across the path from the stump. It wasn’t there that day, so on TLA’s suggestion we went over and started poking around under the branch. After about a minute, she found what she was looking for: owl pellets. Owls eat their prey either whole or tear it into parts, but their digestion isn’t a complete process. A little while after an owl eats, it regurgitates a little bolus of bones, fur, and other indigestibles. Yum!
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