Download "Watch Barn Owls Swallow Rodents Whole | Deep Look"

Barn owls swoop down on rodents and swallow them whole – gophers, voles and mice, gone in a few gulps. But how do they keep down all that food? Well, they don’t. In a few stomach-turning steps, they transform the varmints into compact balls of fur and bones known as pellets. Watch Far Out on PBS Terra! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnNZYWyBGJ1EzMbF4T-PPNmqhXFY87Kfp DEEP LOOK is a ultra-HD (4K) short video series created by KQED San Francisco and presented by PBS Digital Studios. See the unseen at the very edge of our visible world. Explore big scientific mysteries by going incredibly small. -- The secret to turning a whole rodent into an owl pellet is in a barn owl’s stomach. It has two chambers. The first chamber oozes digestive juices, like our stomach. The second one – the gizzard – squeezes the rodent remains with powerful muscles. The fats and proteins get absorbed. After about eight hours in the gizzard, the fur and bones become tightly compacted into an oval that the owl regurgitates. ---+ What can scientists learn by studying what's inside owl pellets? “I think it’s really fascinating you can study their diet so easily by dissecting these pellets,” said Matt Johnson, who oversees the Barn Owl Research Team at Cal Poly Humboldt, in Arcata, California. He and his students monitor 300 nest boxes set up by winegrowers in the state’s Napa Valley. Winegrowers invite barn owls (Tyto furcata) to raise their young in nest boxes. By hunting gophers and voles, which can damage grapevines, barn owls help with pest control. Dissecting owl pellets and pulling out the bones hidden inside helps researchers identify what animals a barn owl ate and how many. In Napa, “voles, mice and gophers make up 90% of what they eat,” said Johnson. “Mice are almost always the third place in that list.” “Their diet varies from place to place and year to year,” he added. “We’ve collected some pellets that are majority voles, or majority gophers.” ---+ How many rodents can a barn owl kill? While a graduate student at Cal Poly Humboldt, Dane St. George estimated in 2020 that a family of barn owls living in and around a vineyard in Napa can eat 3,500 rodents a year. By tracking the barn owls’ movements, he found that almost 45% of the rodents they killed came from within vineyards. ---+ Find additional resources and a transcript on KQED Science: https://www.kqed.org/science/1979934/barn-owl-table-manners-are-just-different ---+ The young barn owl coughing up a *gigantic* pellet in our episode was filmed by a camera in a nest box in Israel. Watch the whole video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCTvWDd7bjc And livestream barn owls, kestrels and other birds here: https://www.youtube.com/c/CharterGroupBirdcams ---+ More Great Deep Look episodes: What Makes Owls So Quiet and So Deadly? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a68fIQzaDBY You’ve Heard of a Murder of Crows. How About a Crow Funeral? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixYVFZnNl6s Watch These Peregrine Falcons Become Fierce Parents https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTNZmnD27is 🏆Congratulations🏆 to the first 5 fans on our Deep Look Community Tab to correctly answer our GIF challenge! The owlet pictured was 63 days old. Blunderbuss13 (63) im a comment J (63) Imani Perlie (63) Justa Bone (64) Moses Aubrey (61) ---+ Thank you to our Top Patreon Supporters ($10+ per month)! Jessica Burt Humburg Karen Reynolds Allison & Maka Masuda Daisuke Goto David Deshpande Wild Turkey J8Zenith Chris B Emrick Tianxing Wang Companion Cube Mark Jobes Blanca Vides Kevin Judge Laurel Przybylski Jana Brenning Jason Jia monoirre Anastasia Grinkevic Titania Juang Roberta K Wright Aurora Supernovabetty Carrie Mukaida Kimberly Hall Jellyman El Samuels KW Syniurge Cristen Rasmussen Nicky Orino Mehdi Shonara Rivas Cindy McGill SueEllen McCann Noreen Herrington Laurel Przybylski Misia Clive Kelly Hong Shelley Pearson Cranshaw Jeremiah Sullivan Caitlin McDonough 吳怡彰 Louis O'Neill Nicolette Ray Elizabeth Ann Ditz Shonara Rivas Delphine Tseng Wade Tregaskis Silvan Levi Cai TierZoo Kenneth Fyrsterling ---+ Follow Deep Look and KQED Science on social: https://www.tiktok.com/@deeplookofficial https://www.patreon.com/deeplook Instagram: https://www.facebook.com/unsupportedbrowser Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/kqedscience ---+ About KQED KQED, an NPR and PBS affiliate in San Francisco, CA, serves Northern California and beyond with a public-supported alternative to commercial TV, radio and web media. Funding for Deep Look is provided in part by PBS Digital Studios. Deep Look is a project of KQED Science, the largest science and environment reporting unit in California. KQED Science is supported by the Dirk and Charlene Kabcenell Foundation, Campaign 21 and the members of KQED.