Photo by John Hoang
A Burrow Owl makes hunting look easy.
There's a lot of things in this photo to comment on, so let's get something going on here. You've all been too quiet lately!
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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For owls that are superb.
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Somehow I never realized owls eat bugs. I guess all the owl pellets I dissected lied to me
Before I started doing all these posts, I just thought owls are rats, mice, moles, and voles, and that was about it.
Now I know they eat just about anything made of meat. Butterflies, worms, frogs, fish, snakes, bats, birds, other owls, skunks, porcupines, and occasionally carrion of deer or wild pigs. The amount of snakes I've seen Mr Owl bring back to the nest on the Hilton Head RaptorCAM has been crazy!
Most pellets I see for sale are labeled as Barn Owl, so that's going to have more rodent and mammal bits.
Pellets are wonderful sources of data. They not only tell us about the owls, but about all those prey animals. Many prehistoric species have been discovered thanks to owls. By roosting in places like caves and coughing up those pellets in there for tens of thousands of years, owls have left behind an amazing cache of animal history!
I never thought about this! So interesting to think of owls contributing to the fossil record (ish) through pellets.
I was listening to something recently about early humans, and the program was saying we originally thought "cavemen" lived in caves, but it's moreso they were originally just the easiest places to find human remains (people and they're stuff) as they preserved things so well.
One of the things that makes owls particularly good at this is that they tend to have a favorite spot to drop their pellet every day, so they tend to leave a bunch in the same place. Find that place, and you're set!
So early humans did use caves for shelter. They didn’t go very deep, and it wasn’t everywhere, but places that have cave paintings those were shelters used.
They were kind of temporary, though, since they followed the food as hunter gatherers.
But yeah, there’s a disproportionate amount of stuff found in caves because of how well they’re preserved.
For sure! Just like now, we live pretty much anywhere we can find something to eat.
The cave is not mandatory. 😄
Just wanted to touch on a stereotype of our ancestors.
Also no evidence of Neanderthals being dumb, it's just the first guy to identify one felt they looked dumb... 😵💫
they were making tools, probably as smart as we are. just a much lower technological head start.
and there's probably a fair bit of neanderthal DNA floating in the human genome. (its a bit... misleading to say europeans have 1-2%; there would have been substantial overlap)