Dissecting a kestrel pellet

The other day I found what I thought was an owl pellet under a big old tree. A pellet consists of the undigestible parts of the bird’s diet, regurgitated in a neat little package.

It was about 4cm long, very pale grey, rounded at one end and tapered at the other. Lots of birds produce pellets – not only owls but also raptors, rooks, jackdaws, gulls, blackbirds, even robins. So I did some research and, so far as I can tell, it seems it’s not an owl pellet but a kestrel pellet.

 

I broke it open. It was dry, crumbly, dusty. It didn’t smell. Inside were lots of tiny bone fragments in a felty wrap of fur and feather.

I used tweezers to pull out fragments – bone, feather, a little claw, something that looked like a tooth.

Kestrels have stronger stomach acid than owls so the bones in their pellets are more damaged and less easy to identify. But the feathers indicate a small bird, and from what’s left of their colouring it was perhaps a long-tailed tit. One fragment looked like a little spiky tooth, perhaps the remains of a shrew.