What Pellets tell us.

Having Barn Owls back on the reserve is good news for them and for visitors. But in nature, everything is eaten by something else. When we found Barn Owl pellets by the entrance to the Watchpoint Hide, we gave them to our pellet man: Don Griss, one of our Saltholme Guides who likes to open these things up and identify the contents. He found the bones of Field Vole and Bank Vole, as we would expect. These animals make up a large proportion of the prey of carnivores and raptors on the reserve. But Don also found something else: the skull of a young Water Vole. This is not something I was expecting. Barn Owls hunt over pasture and tussocky grassland. Water Voles live in reedbeds and quite tall vegetated water margins (at Saltholme they are predominately in reedbeds). But there must be somewhere on the reserve where the two of them come together. It is quite common for the young of many animals to disperse in the autumn, and maybe this particular Barn Owl came upon a young Water Vole as it headed down one of the foot drains that irrigate the wet grassland for feeding and breeding birds. It certainly doesn't make life easy when our target species for conservation management start eating each other.