Subject: More on Kent Ponds Pellets
Date: Jan 14 08:55:02 1999
From: Charles A Pell - jettran at halcyon.com


I felt a bit stupid for suggesting yesterday that the pellets in question
might have come from the resident Harrier population, so I went out this
morning at about 7:15 to check on the nocturnal situation. It was still
somewhat dark, but over a 15 minute period I could see three owls enter the
grove of trees from the open field. The first two went right into the
dense parts of trees, and I could see them move but couldn't identify them
with my inadequate flashlight. The third one came in dangling its prey ,
landed atop one of the trees, and stared at me for some moments before
relocated. It was clearly a Barn Owl.

For those who did not follow the original posts, "the trees" are about 15
pines in an "L" shaped configuration outside a gate at the NW corner of the
compound. The gate can be reached most easily from the road which follows
the W side of the Green River S of 212th, and there is a little parking lot
there.

Just a couple of bits of information on the subject of pellets:

1. On p. 118 Sprunt ("North American Birds of Prey", Bonanza Books, NY,
1955) state that "Stoddard in Georgia found the cotton rat to predominate
in this hawk's (Harrier's) food; from a collection of 1,100 pellets of
undigested material taken from a roosting place of Marsh Hawk, 925 held
remains of this rodent, 84 percent of the total food." He does not further
describe the nature of the pellets, however.

2. On p. 125, Wallace and Mahan ("An Introduction to
Ornithology,"Macmillan, 1975) show pictures of samples of Barn Owl pellets,
together with separated contents. They couldn't look more like the Kent
pellets.

Thanks to the folks who originally described this place.

Chuck Pell
Seattle, WA
jettran at halcyon.com