Outdoor Elements
WHOO was here?
Clip | 4m 20sVideo has Closed Captions
🦉🌲 WHOO was here? While walking along a wooded path, Evie came across a mysterious p
🦉🌲 WHOO was here? While walking along a wooded path, Evie came across a mysterious pile of feathers — and it tells quite a story. In this episode of Outdoor Elements, Evie shows how feather remains can help us identify what animal may have been involved, and why the evidence points to a possible Eastern Screech Owl. She also talks about the few predators that could fe...
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Outdoor Elements is a local public television program presented by PBS Michiana
Outdoor Elements
WHOO was here?
Clip | 4m 20sVideo has Closed Captions
🦉🌲 WHOO was here? While walking along a wooded path, Evie came across a mysterious pile of feathers — and it tells quite a story. In this episode of Outdoor Elements, Evie shows how feather remains can help us identify what animal may have been involved, and why the evidence points to a possible Eastern Screech Owl. She also talks about the few predators that could fe...
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipWell, I found something interesting on a winter hike at Kobus Creek County Park in Elkhart County, Indiana.
Lots of feathers on the ground.
So if you don't want to see a little blood and guts, you might want to tune out.
But for those of you that are interested in what happened here, here's what I found.
Lots of gray banded feathers and they're in clumps.
So a predator picked apart this bird and left most of the feathers.
The carcass is totally gone.
So no muscle, no guts, no.
No skeleton.
The feathers lead us to identify this bird that was eaten as an eastern screech owl, one of our smallest owls in the Great Lakes region.
And the reason we know that it was an owl is if we look closely at these flight feathers, the longest feathers in the, collection here on the ground, the edges are fringed.
Owls have fringed feathers because as they fly at night, that fringe muffles sound.
If you're an owl that's trying to sneak up on a mouse, quiet flight is very important to sneak up on your prey.
Eastern screech owls come in a few different colors in our area, typically gray, maybe with a little bit of brown like this one probably was.
Or red.
A red faced screech owl is also fairly common.
Their wingspan is about 20in.
By comparison, a great horned owl has a wingspan of about 44in or so, and there aren't too many things that would actually catch an eastern screech owl, except possibly a great horned owl.
Both species hunt at night.
Eastern screech owls usually will roost in trees or sometimes in tree cavities and, come out at night to fly in the summertime looking for often insects, believe it or not.
But in the winter they're looking for small mammals.
Great horned owls, on the other hand, will take almost anything that's moving.
Obviously larger birds, that they can find roosting at night, or mammals, they'll take skunks, rabbits, even small raccoons.
So they'll eat many, many different things.
So I'm surmising, can't say for sure that a great horned owl made a meal out of this eastern screech owl, probably sometime early this morning, because the feathers here haven't been trampled.
And, it's definitely a fresh kill sight.
So really interesting.
Keep in mind, it is illegal to keep feathers of birds based on the, Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which only allows people with federal permits to keep and collect feathers, nests or eggs of most of our birds.
Unless it's a comfortable species like wild turkey and you have a license to hunt wild turkey, or unless it's an invasive, non-native species like European starling.
But eastern screech owls are native species, so these feathers would be illegal to keep unless you have a federal permit to do so.
So we're going to leave them here.
Hopefully other hikers will maybe take a look and maybe, identify this as an owl as well.
Just an interesting thing to find along the trail on a winter hike.
Remember, you can find your own outdoor elements when you visit area parks and natural areas.
We'll see you soon.
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