Abstract
Athene cunicularia’s diet is composed of vertebrates and invertebrates, whose relative frequencies can change in space or time. We analyse habitat and temporal variation in the weight and the composition of prey in bird pellets. We collected 396 pellets from nine owl couples for six months and in three open habitats: near forest, far from forest, and urban. Mean pellet weight was 1.03 g. August showed pellets 15% heavier and March 22% lighter than average, differing from the other months. Regarding composition of prey, vertebrates occurred more in the pellets during June, July and August, while invertebrates showed higher frequency in summer months in open habitats far from forest. At the lower taxonomic level, we identified the presence of mammals, serpents, amphibians, birds, beetles, ants, spiders, grasshoppers, woodlice, molluscs and cockroaches in the pellets. The diet during winter in open habitats far from forest showed higher presence of mammals, while summer months in open habitats near forest and in urban habitats showed more hymenopterans. The results showed that A. cunicularia preys on a wide spectrum of prey, but we found some preference for specific prey depending on the season and on the open habitat types.Keywords: Atlantic Forest, pellets, spatial effect, time effect.
Highlights
Material and methodsAthene cunicularia (Molina 1782) – the burrowing owl – occurs in areas of short grasses or other sparse vegetation (Coulombe, 1971)
A. cunicularia produces pellets that can be found under perches or near the owl’s nest (Matter, 2010)
We performed two principal coordinate analyses (PCoA) with the compositional data to graphically visualize the patterns of time and open habitat type distribution of pellets based on weights of different prey items and prey taxon presences
Summary
Material and methodsAthene cunicularia (Molina 1782) – the burrowing owl – occurs in areas of short grasses or other sparse vegetation (Coulombe, 1971). We characterize the diet of A. cunicularia individuals and compare A. cunicularia pellets’ weights and the compositions of food prey during six months in two rural and one urban open habitats of southern Brazil. Our hypothesis is that individuals living in open habitats near fragments of forest have a different composition of food items because there is a mixture of prey from both environments.
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