Bones to pick

So Boy Wonder and I were poking around in this favorite old woods the other day. He climbed a tree and I poked around, just sort of looking for stuff.

There used to be an owl nest in a hollow tree here but the wind picked up and the tree fell over and shattered.

The tree shattered into several pieces and the nest cavity remained intact.

In fact, if I had been ambitious, I could have stuffed it in my pack and brought it home.

But owl nests aren't the sort of thing you bring home and put, say, in your living room.

For one they don't smell very good.

Secondly, they're full to the brim with vole hair.

Thirdly, inside all that vole hair I found skeletons. Lots and lots of skeletons. Leg bones. Tiny hip joints. Jaws. Teeth. All voles.

It was a boneyard of owl proportions.

Interesting, sure, but not the sort of thing you showcase in, say, your living room. Plus, hauling an owl nest out of a National Park I'm sure breaks some sort of federal law or another. Ranger Emmerich would chase me down, give me a ticket for sure.

So I just gave it a good look over and left it there.

In fact, I saw an owl, rather briefly, while I looked through its old nest.

The owl was high in a tree, stayed for a moment, then flew away.

Such is life.

Using a macro lens, I photographed the bones and the hair. The digestive juices in the owls' guts had cleaned the bones perfectly. The sheer number of skeletons was amazing.

Imagine eating chicken in your bed for six months and all the bones were underneath the mattress.

That's what it looked like.

This all makes sense of course, when I watched the owls earlier this spring, they caught a vole about every 15 minutes, sometimes even quicker than that. Spread out over a course of weeks, that adds up to a lot of dead voles in a hurry.

Simple math says that's about 96 voles a day. Even if it averages out to half of that, that still is a lot of voles over the course of weeks it takes to raise a chick to an adult. It also shows just how productive the landscape was. I'm guessing, and this is just a guess, that the owls hunted an area that was maybe a square mile, maybe even less.

Think of the number of voles that had to live there to support the owls.

Add to it that this particular pair of owls fledged five young.

Last I saw, at least three of those young seemed to be doing just fine.

At any rate, they'll have to find a different nesting hole next year. It will be interesting if they can find one in the same area, or if they come back at all.

I've already noticed some trees that look like good candidates.

Let's hope the wind doesn't blow too hard.