What is this thing I found in my garden?

December 4, 2009 11:39 AM

What on earth is this thing I found in my yard? It's the size of an egg.
posted by BuddhaInABucket to Grab Bag (24 answers total)

Best answer: Looks like an owl pellet.
posted by otolith at 11:40 AM on December 4, 2009 [2 favorites]

Yep, owl pellet.
posted by contraption at 11:41 AM on December 4, 2009

Looks like an owl pellet. We used to dissect those in elementary school. Pretty nasty, but cool.
posted by oinopaponton at 11:41 AM on December 4, 2009

Came in to say owl pellet.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 11:42 AM on December 4, 2009

I would guess it's an owl pellet. There are parts of their prey that they cannot digest(hair, teeth, etc), so they regurgitate those bits back up. There are probably other animals that do something similar, but I can't swear to that.
posted by specialnobodie at 11:42 AM on December 4, 2009

Looks like a bird pellet--regurgitated, undigested hair and bone. Owls were the most common source where I grew up.
posted by tellumo at 11:42 AM on December 4, 2009

Best answer: Open it up, you'll find all sorts of animals bones in it. Wash your hands afterward -- birds carry salmonella and other things.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:47 AM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

My neighbor used to take them apart and build bird skeletons out of them. Pretty impressive, she was about 14 at the time.
posted by charlesminus at 11:48 AM on December 4, 2009

If you poke it apart you'll probably find tiny bones and might be able to reconstruct a critter. My kids did this in school.
posted by dlugoczaj at 11:48 AM on December 4, 2009

nthing Owl Pellet.
posted by Xoebe at 11:52 AM on December 4, 2009

Owl pellet! Lucky you. Have fun.
posted by Miko at 11:55 AM on December 4, 2009

Definitely put it on a newspaper and use tweezers to poke it apart! Man, I've waited all my life to find one of these in the wild, but there don't seem to be owls near me. Last month I paid $6 to buy one from the internet to play with.
posted by twistofrhyme at 12:08 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

You can dunk the whole thing in a container of water, which will cut down on flying dust and fur, and the bones it contains will be unharmed.

Caution: I opened an owl pellet once where it became very clear very quickly that the owl's meal had been skunk. Stinky!
posted by rtha at 12:43 PM on December 4, 2009

Response by poster: Consider it poked apart and played with! Here's the remaining fur and uninteresting bone fragments, and here're the significant bones. That was fun!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 12:43 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Cool! Those are almost certainly rodent teeth of some kind. The exact species is hard to determine without a sense of scale (and ideally more of the skull), but the owl's meal was most likely a squirrel, chipmunk, mouse, or vole.
posted by Johnny Assay at 1:30 PM on December 4, 2009

Response by poster: You can't see it in the picture, but a big chunk of fur came out pretty intact- it had the same pattern as a chipmunk stripe! That's interesting, because I've never seen a chipmunk near where I live. I wonder how far an owl's range would be to find non-local animal bones in my backyard.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 3:50 PM on December 4, 2009

Look up. You should be able to tell where he's been roosting - owls don't yark up pellets on the fly. They tend to be habitual - keep a lookout for more pellets in the same area, and white bird poop accumulation somewhere on branches or trunk overhead. Congrats on your newly-discovered neighbor!
posted by Lou Stuells at 6:26 PM on December 4, 2009 [1 favorite]

Oh and if you find them: tiny teeth with bright red coloring on the molars are from shrews.
posted by Lou Stuells at 6:29 PM on December 4, 2009

Response by poster: He's definitely roosting nearby- I heard him hooting the night before I found the pellet, and this morning as well! Hopefully he can take care of the mouse problem we've been having, and I'm looking forward to more pellets I can play with. Thanks everyone for your help!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 6:31 AM on December 5, 2009

Response by poster: Also, I have actually seen a Barn Owl flying near my house before, so I suspect that this is the guy. It's beautiful!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 6:35 AM on December 5, 2009

Best answer: If you heard him hooting, it's not a barn owl. They screech (and fuck it's a frightening screech), not hoot.
posted by daniel striped tiger at 7:16 AM on December 5, 2009

Best answer: Here are some owl call recordings you can use to ID the owl. That was a pretty big pellet so you might have a larger owl, like a great horned.
posted by Miko at 8:24 AM on December 5, 2009

Response by poster: So it's definitely not a barn owl (that's a horrendous noise they make!). The recordings of the great horned owl sound like what I heard. Not as pretty, but still, an owl is an owl, so that's really cool. You folks sure know a lot about owls!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:08 AM on December 5, 2009

Heck, you can buy sanitized ones at ThinkGeek.
posted by IndigoRain at 7:19 PM on December 6, 2009