Abstract
The assessment of feeding conditions and variations in diet composition over the pre-breeding period of birds plays a keyrole in the understanding of reproductive performance. Pellets regurgitated by the Little Owl, Athene noctua, were collected from Boulhilet (Batna, north-east Algeria). The analysis of 48 pellets resulted in the identification of 471 prey-items of 38 different species classified into 6 classes, 7 orders, 21 families, and 35 genera. Although the diet of the Little Owl mainly consists of arthropods, it is highly diverse (Food Niche Breadth = 14.5, Shannon index = 4.4 bits). Insects are made up 90% of the consumed food; however, they accounted only for 8% of the total biomass. Small mammal prey constituting a rich source of energy during the pre-breeding period, when other kinds of prey are not available due to cold conditions, made up 72% of the diet biomass. We found no significant variation in rodents as a component (number of prey-individuals, biomass, and prey-species richness, prey-s...
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